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PUBLISHED BY 

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 



A GARDEN ROSARY. 

THE HOUSE OF FRIENDSHIP. 

OUR COMMON ROAD. 

CAPE COD NEW AND OLD. Illustrated. 



CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 



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CAPE COD 

New tS Old 

BY 
AGNES EDWARDS 



WITH ILLUSTRATIONS 

BY 

LOUIS H. RUYL 




BOSTON AND NEW YORK 

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 

Wat jRitierfittic 3^itii Cambri&Be 

1918 



■ CSrr'S 



COPYRIGHT, igiS, BY AGNES EDWARDS PRATT 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 

Published May iqi8 



Z.oo 



m II 1918 

©CI.A489309 



To him whose feet have so often tramped 
the Cape Cod moors and beaches: whose 
hands have wrought beauty in many of 
her neglected places; and whose spirit 
has become one with the sunshine and 
simplicity of this wide horizon — 

TO MY FATHER 

JOHN JAY ELMENDORF ROTHERY 

this book is affectionately 
dedicated 



CONTENTS 

The Lost Road: A Foreword . . . xi 

I. The Cape Cod Canal 1 

II. Bourne and the Cape Cod Canal . . 4 

III. Sandwich — The Oldest Cape Town . 22 

IV. Barnstable — The County Seat . . 39 
V. Yarmouth and Cape Cod Methodism . 59 

VI. New Industries and Old in Dennis . 72 
VII. Brewster and Cape Cod Architecture . 88 

VIII. Orleans 1^1 

IX. Eastham and the Agricultural Future 

OF THE Cape H^ 

X. Wellfleet and Cape Fishing . . .126 

XI. Truro 1^9 

XII. Provincetown .149 

XIII. Chatham and the Life-saving Service . 170 

XIV. Harwich and the Cape Cod Schools . 187 
XV. Falmouth the Prosperous . . . .198 

XVI. By a Cape Cod Pond 216 

XVII. A Forgotten Corner of Cape Cod . 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

Provincetown from Town Hill . . Frontispiece 

An Old Windmill at Cataumet . . . . xi 

The Crossways, Cataumet xvi 

The New York Boat in the Canal ... 1 

A Brewster Clipper 3 

Richard Bourne teaching the Indians . . 4 

The Author's Home at Cataumet, with Old 

Mill, /acm^ 4 

The Tupper House in Sandwich .... 22 

The Old Church in Sandwich, facing . . 36 

An Old Cape Cod House 38 

Cape Cod Types: Indian, Puritan, Portuguese, 

Finn, Summer Resident 39 

The Barnstable Marshes, /acinar . , . . 56 

Seafaring Men 59 

Yarmouth's Main Street, facing .... 60 

Dennis Bird-Houses 71 

Cranberry-Pickers, /ac2w^ 84 

Salt- Works at Dennis 87 

An Old Fireplace 88 

A Brewster Doorway, facing 90 

A Cape Cod Stagecoach 101 



X ILLUSTRATIONS 

Duck-shooting, /acm^r 106 

Early Camp-Meeting 116 

Agriculture, /ocmgr 116 

Celery-growing 125 

Building a Whaling-Ship 126 

The Wellpleet Man is First of All a Seaman, 

facing 126 

Leaving Provincetown 138 

Grand View Farm, Truro 139 

On the Truro Highway, /acinar .... 140 

Provincetown Sand-Dunes 149 

The Pilgrim Memorial Monument at Province- 
town, /acinar 152 

The Twin Lights of Chatham . . . .170 

The Life-S a vers, /acir?^ 182 

An Old Salt 186 

A Cape Cod School 187 

A Street in Harwich, /acin^ 192 

Through Pine- Wood Roads 197 

Shiverick Pond, Falmouth 198 

Village Green, Falmouth, /acinar . . . .198 

An Old-fashioned Garden 215 

A Cape Cod Pond 216 

Mashpee Indians 226 

Canaumet Neck, Mashpee 239 







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THE LOST ROAD 



A FOREWORD 

IT was not so very long ago — only ten or 
fifteen years — that every spring and fall 
witnessed a picturesque and fragmentary 
pageant, w^inding its leisurely way" along the 
sandy road from Boston to Cape Cod. First 
there would come a couple of well-bred horses, 
driven either by a gentleman who continually 
and impatiently shook the thickly settling 
dust from his cloak, or by an imperturbable 
groom in livery. Behind these there would be 



xii THE LOST ROAD 

another horse, or may be two, being led from 
the back seat. Possibly there would be another 
carriage attached to the first. This entourage 
was being engineered to or from one of those 
charming summer places on Cape Cod which 
— more rare then than they are to-day be- 
cause of their inaccessibility — had something 
of the air of feudal estates. It was quite neces- 
sary to bring your owti tea and tacks and cut 
sugar and glue in those days, for the village 
stores furnished no such luxuries and few ne- 
cessities. Now the mail comes three times 
daily, and the automobile has brought the 
summer cottage within a few easy hours of 
Boston. To-day, on Saturday afternoons, the 
w^ell-oiled highway is alive with glancing cars, 
and on the great drawbridge over the canal 
at Buzzard's Bay on holidays two traffic police- 
men are kept busy from daw^n to dusk. 

We will not say that the modern way is not 
as good or even better than the old way; that 
the thermos bottle does not fulfill its mission 
as acceptably as did the chafing-dish, which 
we were wont to set up in a meadow, and make 



THE LOST ROAD xiii 

our tea upon; or that the frequent garage does 
not prove as friendly as did the rambhng livery 
stable where the gentleman used to stop at 
midday, and see that the horses were properly 
rubbed down, fed and watered, before the 
twenty-mile drive in the afternoon. But the 
old way was a charming way, and we who knew 
it well recall it with affectionate memories. 
Memories that, like ribbons at a children's 
party, if followed to their proper conclu- 
sion, reveal a sugar plum at the end. Mem- 
ories of a little town in which we once found 
ourselves quite as inexplicably as in the town 
in a dream — although, perhaps, the devious 
turnings of the unmarked roads were respon- 
sible for our straying. Here a river ran one 
side of the village street; white cottages, 
hedged by lilacs, dotted the other. Children, 
shy-eyed and wondering, gazed at us, and the 
old ladies, like the decent country dames in a 
rural English shire, looked soberly forth. We 
stopped and asked for a drink of water, and 
while we were drinking, peeked surreptitiously 
at the thrifty little house, with its well-kept 



xiv THE LOST ROAD 

bits of ancient furniture — fain to linger longer, 
but ashamed of the obviousness of our excuse. 
At last, reluctantly, we drove away, and never 
again, in our subsequent searchings, did we 
ever find that village on any trip, either to or 
from the Cape. Perhaps when the sign-boards 
were put up at the cross ways, directing trav- 
elers "To All Points on the Cape," the minia- 
ture hamlet saw its opportunity of withdraw- 
ing into its idyllic seclusion. Memories, too, 
of large old mansions, which originally stood 
near the sea, and from whose carved and fan- 
lighted doors sea captains issued grandly forth. 
But when we discovered them, we found a 
desolate marsh where once the sea had been, 
and in the dim, echoing house only a few de- 
caying relics of the past. You might occasion- 
ally purchase genuine antiques, a decade ago, 
if you were not too proud to carry them away, 
secured with a hitching-rope to the back of 
your wagon. Memories of picnics in apple 
orchards where the drowsy silence was un- 
broken by any shriek of the passing motor . . . 
When I close my eyes in reminiscence of those 



THE LOST ROAD xv 

semi-annual journeys to the Cape, I seem to 
feel again the gentle jog of the yellow- wheeled 
dogcart, in which Joe Jefferson of fragrant 
memory on the Cape had driven many miles, 
and which followed, quaintly enough, on the 
heels of our old gray mare. Automobiles were 
becoming more frequent then, and many of 
them, as they whizzed by, paused to smile at 
our gypsy paraphernalia, packed na'ively on 
behind our open cart. The blue eyes and 
peachblow face of my sunny-haired friend be- 
side me probably did not detract in the least 
from the picture we presented. Who has time, 
to-day, to notice whether the tourists to the 
Cape are blue-eyed or brown, or whether it is 
a coffee-pot or an automobile kit that is slung 
on behind? 

The old road to the Cape is lost — and with 
it much of the dust, both of reality and ro- 
mance. But a new road has opened, bring- 
ing every year hundreds and hundreds of 
automobiles; and literally thousands of men 
and women who would otherwise never breathe 
the balmy air or see those windswept moors. 



XVI 



THE LOST ROAD 



Surely, we old Cape-Codders must and do 
greet them all hospitably. It is for their special 
welcoming that this little book is written. And 
if, perhaps, it is touched too fondly by the 
spirit of reminiscence, that fault may be for- 
given by the newcomers, and may endear it 
more to those who are not strangers to Cape 
Cod. 




CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 




T 



ij^^^^e^ ^jff^# 






CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

Chapter I 
THE CAPE COD CANAL 

O a stranger, strolling in the evening along 
the pleasant Bournedale Valley, the hour 
of nine is heralded by a spectacular phe- 
nomenon. From far down the narrow strip 
of water, which is called the Cape Cod Canal, 
but which seems, from this secluded spot, as 
quiet as a country brook, there flashes a 
piercing, boring, burrowing shaft of light: a 
terrifically powerful incandescence — spring- 
ing from an unseen source, and cleaving a 
dazzling path for miles ahead. Then, as if 
awakened from *' the first sweet sleep of 
night" by the unnatural sunrise, there vibrates 
the roar of a foghorn, which, in turn, arouses 



% CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

echoes far and near. On the bridge at Buz- 
zard's Bay bells ring and ring, and ring again; 
red lights appear; the two mighty jaws of the 
drawbridge slowly rise and stand open, darkly 
silhouetted against the sky. People gather at 
the crossroads ; automobiles, halted by the 
lifting of the bridge, rapidly form a string of 
twinkling beads upon the incline. And then, 
slowly, irresistibly, majestically, the New 
York boat — gleaming white and hung with 
lights like a fairy ship — appears. It is strange 
to see this floating palace coming through the 
Cape Cod meadows; strange to hear, as if at 
our very doorsteps, the laughter and scatter- 
ing voices of people that crowd the open decks. 
And strangest of all, to be, for one brief instant, 
sucked into the orbit of that great searchlight, 
which, like the peering eye of some monstrous 
Cyclops, flings its penetrating ray here — 
there — up — down — illuminating as in a 
blazing noon the shyest path and the tiniest 
cottage that comes within its ray. 

As the boat steams between the lifted sec- 
tions of the bridge, voices on the shore call out 



THE CAPE COD CANAL 3 

greetings, and voices from the boat respond. 
For a moment there is that curious inter- 
change of human intimacy that may only pass 
between strangers. 

The boat steams on and out. The jaws 
descend and clamp together, the bells cease 
ringing, the automobiles speed across the 
bridge, and the idlers disperse along the 
country road. The New York boat has 
passed. 





Chapter II 



BOURNE AND THE CAPE COD CANAL 

THE town of Bourne, from which the 
famous canal starts, marks the geographi- 
cal beginning of Cape Cod. Strangers in this 
part of the country are frequently puzzled by 
the colloquial use of the word " town," for 
each Cape town — of which there are fifteen 
— • usually contains half a dozen or even a 
dozen small hamlets within its confines, each 
one with its separate name, post-office, railway 
station, and distinctive personality. These 
smaller settlements might very easily be called 
" towns," but the local way is prettier: they 
are " neighborhoods." Major-General Leonard 
Wood was born in Pocasset; the yellow house 
— square and vine-clad, on its wide lawn — ■ 






/7 




BOURNE AND THE CANAL 5 

stands at the crossroads. And Pocasset is a 
neighborhood in the town of Bourne. So also 
Buzzard's Bay — from which the canal ac- 
tually starts — is a neighborhood in the town 
of Bourne. 

The name of Buzzard's Bay is perhaps bet- 
ter known than that of the mother district. 
Buzzard's Bay is a railroad center and a sum- 
mer resort. It is at this point that the first 
Cape coolness strikes through the train, 
rumbling down from Boston laden with sum- 
mer folk and heat; it is from here that cars 
connect for Provincetown and Chatham, and 
to and from Wood's Hole; it is here that 
Joseph Jefferson and Grover Cleveland had 
their summer homes, — Crow's Nest and 
Gray Gables, — as well as a score of other 
eminent men before and since. But in spite of 
its prominence. Buzzard's Bay is only a small 
portion of Bourne, which existed before there 
was any Joseph Jefferson, or any railroad to 
the Cape, or any canal. 

As you glance out from your car window, or 
from your flying automobile, even if you 



6 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

alight and look around, you may not find 
here, at first, anything that seems particularly 
unique. There are characteristic Cape Cod 
houses, of course, — gray or white, shingled or 
clapboarded, a few with porches, but most of 
them without, a story and a half high, with the 
beauty of simplicity and the lure of modest 
content. The extraordinarily good roads that 
criss-cross here are part of the network that 
threads the whole Cape and makes it possible 
to spin from one end to the other as smoothly 
and cleanly as on a magic carpet. There are 
telephones, a public library, and high school 
and town hall — all the paraphernalia of a 
modern and comfortable Cape town. For 
Cape Cod is very prosperous these days: her 
hard struggle wresting a living from the sea is 
over. Now she gets her bread and butter from 
her cranberry bogs, and more and more fre- 
quently a goodly coating of jam from the per- 
quisites from the summer people. Of course it 
is the canal that gives Bourne her present emi- 
nence, but the present is built upon a past 
both honorable and charming. So before we 



BOURNE AND THE CANAL 7 

investigate the canal, it might be well to stroll 
down the quiet streets, and hear something 
of those far-off days when Jonathan Bourne, 
for whom the town was most felicitously 
named, gathered under the mantle of his 
preaching all the Indians from Middleboro to 
Province town. 

This good man was a friend of Eliot, and 
taught almost one hundred and fifty of the red 
men to read the Eliot Bible. He began his 
labors in 1658, and thirty years later the num- 
ber of praying Indians — praying under his 
tutelage in twenty-two different places on the 
Cape — had reached a thousand and fourteen, 
including six hundred warriors. One likes to 
read of his patient and loving labors among 
these aborigines who had received — and 
were about to receive — anything but loving 
treatment from the hands of their white 
brothers. One likes to remember that the 
town was named after him, and that his de- 
scendants still live in it. There is a story that 
several years after his death a child of his was 
stricken by a mortal disease and given up by 



8 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

the doctors. But the faithful Indians, who 
cherished a reverent and faithful memory for 
the pastor of their souls, came from miles 
around with their medicine men, and, begging 
the mother's permission, treated the child with 
wizardry and incantation and herbs and 
simples, working hour after hour with zealous 
fanaticism. The story is concluded — and we 
have no reason to doubt it — that the child 
recovered. And, after all, there have been 
stranger revelations of faith and its healing 
fruit. 

The good Jonathan Bourne finally went to 
live with the Indians at Mashpee, and died 
there — after a long and singularly exalted 
life. The serious chronicle comes down to us 
with a few amusing irrelevancies. We hear 
that at one time Bourne hired an Indian to 
build a stone wall around a portion of his land, 
promising him a barrel of rum when it was 
finished. It was no meager estate, for legend 
has it that he had been presented by the In- 
dians with all the land he could blaze between 
sunup and sundown — which made him the 



BOURNE AND THE CANAL 9 

owner of the large area which bears his name 
and which extended from Falmouth to Ware- 
ham and infringed a trifle on both. However, 
the Indian, spurred on by the waiting reward, 
worked with a vengeance — and worked for 
years. But when he got within a few hundred 
yards of the end, he fell dead, and so he never 
got his drink, after all. The stone w^all still 
runs through the woods, and although it no 
longer bounds anything, it is in a fair state of 
preservation. 

The whole history of Bourne is associated 
with this family. Ruins of the original home- 
stead may still be seen near the banks of the 
canal, and from the private graveyard, not so 
very long ago, a thigh bone was dug up, twenty- 
seven inches long, the last earthly reminder of 
some eight-footer. As a matter of fact, the en- 
tire digging of the canal was complicated by 
old legends and curious fragments of the past. 
At the curve near Bournedale there was a 
tradition of a slave buried with a barrel of 
money, and with the assurance that if his 
bones were disturbed the offender would be 



10 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

cursed. The money did not materialize during 
the excavation; but the curse did. It is a curi- 
ous fact that practically all the difficulties in- 
cident to the building of the canal, and all the 
accidents in it since then, have occurred at this 
very spot. 

Ever since the earliest days there has been 
speculation concerning such a waterway as 
has at last been achieved. The reason is ob- 
vious. The Cape stretches out to sea, sixty- 
five miles on the north shore and eighty on the 
south. The hook at Provincetown has caught 
thousands of unwary and unfortunate ves- 
sels : during the last sixty-five years alone more 
than two thousand vessels were wrecked in the 
waters of the Cape and seven hundred lives 
lost. It was evident that a canal would not 
only minimize the danger of that terrifically 
rough route, but would shorten it immensely. 
Many places through which to cut such a wa- 
terway have seemed tempting, but the line be- 
tween Buzzard's Bay and Barnstable Bay was 
through an alluvial deposit only eight miles in 
width, with a surface elevation of twenty-nine 



BOURNE AND THE CANAL 11 

feet above tidewater — which points finally 
won for it its selection. The Pilgrims, educated 
to the convenience of canals by their sojourn 
in the Low Countries, had vainly tried to com- 
plete one across the Cape. The old charts of 
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries indi- 
cate the possible routes they considered. Later 
the High Court of the Colony ordered an ex- 
amination and survey. Then George Wash- 
ington decreed that '' the interior barrier should 
be cut in order to give greater security to navi- 
gation and against the enemy." Later the 
canal project was vigorously agitated by Gen- 
eral Knox, Secretary Gallatin, Winthrop, and 
Thorndike. In 1860 the Legislature of Massa- 
chusetts published an exhaustive report set- 
ting forth the feasibility of such an undertak- 
ing. The agitation was incessant and fruitless : 
it was not until 1909 that anything was actu- 
ally done. Then Mr. August Belmont, who was 
born on the Cape and has always had an affec- 
tion for the place, conferred with Mr. William 
Barclay Parsons, who had been a member of 
the Panama Canal Commission and had also 



n CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

constructed the New York Subway, and three 
years later, with flags and floats and bells and 
lights, the canal was opened. 

The casual traveler who pauses upon the 
drawbridge at Buzzard's Bay or at Sagamore, 
and gazes up and down the peacefully curving 
stream, seeing the little vessels slide under his 
feet, while the great jaws of the bridge open for 
the passage of the taller ones, has hardly more 
conception of the value of this waterway than 
might an Indian, returning from his happy 
hunting-grounds after three hundred years, 
and standing awe-stricken as the vast ''white- 
winged birds," as he called all ships, float 
through his level pasture land down to the 
great ocean. 

Most tourists are amazed to learn that the 
canal — following the line of Bournedale Val- 
ley — is thirteen miles long, and that on each 
side runs a flawless automobile road; that it is 
a hundred feet wide at the bottom and three 
hundred at the top; that it saves seventy miles 
of the distance between New York and Bos- 
ton. That is probably as far as they care to 



BOURNE AND THE CANAL 13 

follow the statistics. It means little to them 
to be told that this is the only large canal — ex- 
cept those of Suez and Manchester — which 
has been built by private enterprise (incident- 
ally, the majority of the Suez Canal stock is 
now owned by the British Government and 
that of the Manchester Canal by the city of 
Manchester); or that it cost twelve million 
dollars; or that while it is not deep enough for 
warships of the battleship class, it could be 
made deep enough, and that it is pledged to 
surrender itself for Government use in time of 
war; or that twenty-five thousand vessels, 
carrying approximately twenty-five million 
tons of freight, used to pass around the Cape 
through Vineyard Sound — a tonnage equal to 
that of the Suez Canal. While it is not possible 
even yet to estimate the precise tonnage pass- 
ing through the Cape Cod Canal, and while the 
great boom of prosperity which it promised to 
bring has come more slowly than was expected; 
nevertheless, this canal ranks with one of the 
most important in the world, and if it had 
been cut through sooner might have gained a 



14 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

marine supremacy equal to that of the Hudson 
River. 

The work was first undertaken w ith suction 
dredges, but great boulders, some of them 
weighing twenty tons, barred the way. The 
natives recalled the old legend about the Devil, 
who came down the Cape one fine day step- 
ping from one hill to another to keep from get- 
ting his feet wet. His apron was full of bould- 
ers, and as he entered the town of Bourne a 
chickadee laughed at him. In a rage he seized 
a boulder from his apron and started to throw 
it at the bird. But he stumbled and fell, and the 
boulders landed in Bournedale and are pointed 
out from one generation of children to the other 
as the place where the Devil broke his apron 
strings. However that may be, the huge 
boulders were there when the suction dredges 
were installed, and shovels and locomotives 
were set to tugging at them, — mammoth 
dental instruments against a colossal mouth, 
— each one bringing up twenty thousand tons 
of earth a day, or as much in every scoop as 
could be shoveled by one man working ten 



BOURNE AND THE CANAL 15 

hours. The material was dumped upon scows 
and deposited in deep water. Two machine 
shops had to be set up, — one at each end of 
the canal, — as the work necessitated con- 
stant repairs and the making of new imple- 
ments. Two dikes, something like the Gam- 
boa at Panama, were built, and the central part 
of the canal was dug with steam shovels. Elec- 
trically driven pumps kept the water down 
when the men were working below tide. When 
the work was completed the dikes were dy- 
namited, and the two bays brought together. 
The canal is a sea-level one, and is constructed 
without a tidal lock, the necessity for one be- 
ing obviated by the three hours' difference in 
time between the periods of slack water on the 
two sides of the Cape. 

It is easy to see for one's self any of the most 
interesting features of the canal. The three 
drawbridges — one at Buzzard's Bay, one at 
Bourne, and one at Sagamore - — open spec- 
tacularly in a prodigious yawn at the passing 
through of all tall vessels. The double line 
of lights curve with the curve of the canal, 



16 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

making a sort of brilliant Broadway across the 
quiet landscape. There is a complete tele- 
phone and telegraph system; a transatlantic 
cable; and signals to blow and sparkle in time 
of fog and when the bridges are lifted. These 
precautions are not too many, for the ghastly 
accident of a few winters ago is still vivid in 
many minds. It was during a blinding snow- 
storm, and an automobile was on the draw- 
bridge when it opened. Imagine the horror of 
the occupants when they felt rising under 
them a sheer vertical wall, as impossible to 
scale as the side of a house, and saw gaping be- 
hind them a deadly chasm, between the shore 
end of the draw and the bridge. For only a 
moment could the brakes hold to that per- 
pendicular surface. To jump w^as immediate 
death; to stay was to defer the end only a few 
seconds. Slowly at first and then with terrific 
speed the auto slid backward down the incline, 
reached the opening and crashed through the 
darkness to the black rocks and rushing water 
forty feet below . . . 

Down toward Sandwich one can see the mas- 



BOURNE AND THE CANAL 17 

sive breakwater, three thousand feet long, and 
containing three hundred and fifty thousand 
tons of granite. At the Buzzard's Bay end the 
passage out has been deepened for five miles, 
in the same fashion as the Panama Bay on the 
Pacific side of the Isthmus. 

As the franchise gave the Canal Company 
the right to buy or condemn property if neces- 
sary, in order that it might have a canal zone 
of one thousand feet at each end, and six hun- 
dred feet through the central part, this even- 
tually resulted in several lawsuits. In one of 
these. Gray Gables, the home of former Presi- 
dent Cleveland, was involved. The canal also 
divided several villages — in Bournedale the 
railroad station is on one side, and the vil- 
lage is on the other, and one must cross by 
means of a ferry. A relocation of several miles 
of railroad was necessary, to which the rail- 
road officials showed no objection, realizing 
that whatever cheapens water communication 
benefits the mills, and that products of the 
mills will be shipped over the railway. And 
mills and factories are confidently expected 



18 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

to line the banks of the canal at some future 
date. 

We who idly stand watching the traffic of 
the world pass along this little stream of water, 
or who come up in automobiles to see the New 
York boat pass through, have almost forgot- 
ten — if we ever heard of it — the first trad- 
ing-station made upon this spot. On the south 
bank of the Manomet River, — the Indian 
name has been changed to Monument by care- 
less use, — halfway between Gray Gables and 
where the railway station was built in 1880, the 
Pilgrims placed a trading-post in 1627. Here 
it was that on September 2 of that year Miles 
Standish sailed up from the Scusset River to 
meet the sloops of the merchant De Rasieres, 
who had been sent out by New Amsterdam to 
answer the starvation call of the English pio- 
neers. Here a trading-post — or pinnance — 
was established, where the colonists exchanged 
sugar and linen stuffs and other goods with the 
Dutch of New Amsterdam and the colonists 
of Virginia. There was no settlement there: 
only a rude station, as the forerunner of the 



BOURNE AND THE CANAL 19 

communication that now flows so easily along 
the whole Atlantic Coast. 

There is another tale to be told about Bourne 
and the Manomet River; perhaps the most 
strange, surely the saddest, of all. It was in 
1756 that a company of people, speaking 
French, appeared here in seven two-masted 
boats. They landed, and came wearily ashore, 
explaining, as best they could in their broken 
patois, that they wished to have their vessels 
and their women and children carted across 
the land to the opposite bay. One can pic- 
ture them, gathered in a wistful group on the 
sands, the men with stocking caps and the 
women with white kerchiefs on their heads, 
while the children, like and unlike the sober 
little Puritans who wondered at them, held 
tightly to a paternal hand or maternal petti- 
coat. 

These ninety souls were the last remnant 
of the seven thousand Acadians who had been 
driven from the exquisite Annapolis Valley by 
the British, and, after a heart-breaking period 
of exile, were now making one despairing bold 



20 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

rush for home again, snatching at any hand 
to help them. 

There is extant a letter from Silas Bourne 
to Colonel Otis concerning them, which says: 
" They profess to be bound for Boston and want 
their boats carted across to the opposite bay. 
They have their women and their children 
with them, and they say were last from Rhode 
Island, but previously from Nova Scotia. I 
fear they may continue, when once in the 
ocean, to miss Boston, and think it safe, there- 
fore, to detain them." 

Thus it was that the pitiful little band — 
Papists and strangers in a strange land — 
were distributed in lots among the various 
towns for "safe keeping" — ^ not to mention 
regeneration. In due time the court ordered 
their boats sold. It is safe to presume that none 
of these pathetic wayfarers ever reached home, 
or came in touch again with any of their own 
kin, who were also in "safe keeping" in other 
coast towns. Not a trace of them remains on 
Cape Cod: not a name on a hill or path. There 
are no descendants to preserve even the faint- 



BOURNE AND THE CANAL 21 

est tradition of the past. The whole band 
seems to have been completely obliterated — 
swallowed up forever by the congregation of 
"the Lord's people." It was in the beginning 
of the nineteenth century, however, that a 
great storm shifted the sands near Scusset 
Neck and revealed traces of what might have 
once been a French settlement. Here it was, 
in all probability, that the unfortunate Acad- 
ians had gathered; near the harbor where they 
could look out over the wide waste of water 
that separated them from all that they held 
dear — from Grand Pre and the noble river. 
A pathetic folk, doomed to live and finally to 
die, among a hostile people: foreigners, igno- 
rant of the language about them; Romanists 
without a priest — their homesickness and 
despair are better told by Longfellow in his sad 
and gentle story of "Evangeline." But we, 
to-day, untangling the strong, plain threads 
that made up the warp and woof of simple 
Puritan life in Bourne, pause a moment as our 
fingers touch this solitary silken strand — so 
rudely broken, long ago. 




Chapter III 



SANDWICH— THE OLDEST CAPE TOWN 

SANDWICH, Yarmouth, and Barnstable 
all date their incorporation from 1639, but 
Sandwich stubbornly insists that she is the 
oldest of the three. And she is right. 

Although, as explained in the previous chap- 
ter, there had been a trading-post established 
on the southern shore of the Manomet River 
in 1627, yet there was no English settlement 
on the Cape until April 3, 1637, when ten men 
from Saugus were magnanimously given per- 
mission by the court at Plymouth to "have 
the liberty to view a place to sit down in, and 
have sufficient land for threescore families." 
It is rather amusing to hear of liberty to "sit 



SANDWICH 23 

down " granted to a people who, from the be- 
ginning of their history, have shown anything 
but a desire to "sit down," but rather a most 
determined disposition to range from pole to 
pole, either by sea or land. However, these 
ten men, — perhaps glad to '*get up" from 
Plymouth, — after hunting around a little 
while, selected a place of residence, and 
named it Sandwich, after a seaport in Kent. 

The names of these ten men are noteworthy, 
not only because of the distinction of the orig- 
inal bearers, but because of the perpetuation 
of them in Cape Cod records ever since. They 
were Edmund Freeman, Henry Feake, Thomas 
Dexter, Edward Dillingham, William Wood, 
John Carman, Richard Chad well, William 
Almy, Thomas Tupper, and George Knott. 
Sir Charles Tupper, the last of the fathers of 
the Canadian Confederacy, who died in Lon- 
don in 1916, was a direct descendant of this 
"man from Saugus." 

Soon after the settlement was begun, the 
ever-vigilant Plymouth Colony sent two com- 
missioners to Sandwich to set forth the 



^4 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

"bounds of the land granted there." They 
were commanded to go "with all convenient 
speed," which probably averaged about three 
miles an hour; and it quickens school-day 
memories to know that their names were Miles 
Standish and John Alden. They evidently did 
their duty according to directions, for the lit- 
tle town immediately entered upon a thor- 
oughly regular and decorous career: so deco- 
rous, indeed, that it fared ill with any but the 
strictest, as the records of two hapless bachelors 
who had innocently undertaken to "sit down" 
shows. They had no families, and although 
they were diligently laboring to clear the 
ground for future uses, they were promptly 
arraigned in Plymouth for "disorderly keep- 
ing house alone," which throws another light 
upon the desirability of winning a Priscilla in 
those days. 

Church was established; laws rigidly en- 
forced; meadow-land which had previously 
been laid out was again "divided by equal 
proportion, according to every man's estate"; 
a common for the pasturage of young cattle 



SANDWICH 25 

was decided upon. And then, having safely 
found a secure and pleasant place which they 
could call their own, and in which they could 
enjoy the pleasure of individual freedom more 
easily than at Plymouth, they unanimously 
decreed that ''no other inhabitants would be 
received into the town, or have lands assigned 
to them by the committee, without the con- 
sent of Mr. Leverich [the minister] and the 
church " — a. complacent narrowness entirely 
characteristic of the early records of our fore- 
fathers. 

Sandwich — that village which lies so 
dreamily around its willow-shaded pool, with 
the peaceful graveyard basking in the sun, 
one of the sweetest of all the Cape towns, es- 
pecially to those who know the way of ap- 
proach through the woods, and to whom the 
sylvan clearing blooms forth in ever lovely, 
ever fresh surprise — was a stern place in 
those early days. The winters were severe. 
The settler had to modify his English ideas 
of agriculture, and to feed his cattle on the 
wild grass of the salt marshes. He lived in 



26 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

a thatched hut, and worked from morning 
till night. He fought blackbirds, crows, and 
pigeons in swarms. He raved against the 
wolves and they raved back at him, until the 
last one was shot by a teamster from his load 
of wood in 1839.^ 

Before there was a gristmill in Sandwich, 
men either had to walk to Plymouth and back 
with a grist of corn on their shoulders, or to 
follow the Indian fashion of pounding corn in 
a mortar. There was no sawmill nearer than 
Scituate. 

As though they did not have trouble enough 
with the elements and the inevitable difficul- 
ties of pioneers, as soon as these intrepid first 
settlers had subdued their surroundings enough 
to enable them to draw breath, they turned 
themselves to an energetic campaign against 
the Quakers. 

^ At one time Sandwich, in despair about these fierce ma- 
rauders, proposed a palisade fence, ten feet high, to run from 
Buzzard's Bay to Massachusetts Bay, so as to keep out the 
wolves. Objections were made quite strenuously by the peo- 
ple on the other side of the fence, who, with good show of 
reason, did not relish the idea of being deliberately penned 
up with the brutes, even for the sake of accommodating their 
neighbors. 



SANDWICH 27 

Cape Cod has been entirely free from the 
witchcraft mania which swept the North 
Shore, but her behavior toward the Quakers 
fills a page as shocking as any hangings on 
Gallows Hill in Salem. There was more trouble 
in Sandwich than in the other towns of Barn- 
stable County, not necessarily because there 
was more bitterness, but because there were 
more Quakers. The persecution began in 1657 
and lasted for four years, until Charles the 
Second put an end to it. The laws were exces- 
sively cruel and were cruelly enforced. En- 
tertaining a Quaker — even for a quarter of 
an hour — cost five pounds, the year's pay of 
a laboring man. If any one saw a Quaker and 
did not inform the constable, — even if he had 
to go six miles for the purpose, — he was pun- 
ishable at the discretion of the court. For 
allowing preaching in one's own house, the fine 
was forty shillings: in addition the preacher 
was fined forty shillings, and each auditor 
forty shillings, although no one of them might 
have spoken a word. The Quakers were fined 
for every Sunday that they went to their own 



28 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

meeting-house, and for every Sunday that 
they did not go to that of the Puritans. In 
three years, besides other punishment, there 
were taken from them cattle, horses, and sheep 
to the value of seven hundred pounds. The 
fines of William Allen alone amounted to eighty- 
seven pounds. In addition to this, they were 
flogged, banished, and had their ears cut off. 

And yet the people of Sandwich insisted 
then — and maintain to this day — that they 
personally had no animosity toward this per- 
secuted sect, but were forced to these extreme 
measures by the Plymouth Colony. The facts, 
indeed, seem to substantiate this claim. There 
are many records of a Quaker having to be 
sent to a neighboring town for punishment, 
local feeling running so high against such treat- 
ment in Sandwich. Ultimately so many of the 
citizens were fined for expressing sympathy 
with Quaker views that the town constable 
could not perform his duties and a special 
marshal from Plymouth was appointed to fill 
his place ! This marshal — Barlow — would 
have inspired Dickens with material for an- 



SANDWICH 29 

other Squeers of Dotheboys Hall. When sent 
to levy on the goods of a Quaker he used to 
seize the article which could be least spared, — 
such as the family kettle, — thus revealing a 
malignity only equaled by its ingenuity. 

In order to understand the vindictive in- 
tolerance of the Puritans toward a people who, 
all agreed, were inoffensive enough in their 
personal lives, one must realize that a com- 
munity like this was built upon the belief that 
the ministerial office was sacred. The church 
organization was an essential part of the social 
and ethical life. Therefore, any people who 
merely followed what they called the "inward 
light," and who had no consideration for paid 
preachers, believing that the Divine Revela- 
tion comes to all alike, were dangerous, not 
only religiously but civically. This, coupled 
with the irritation we always feel toward a 
thing which we do not quite understand, ex- 
plains in a measure the Puritans' determina- 
tion to drive the Quakers out of the colony. 
And it accounts, also, for the difference be- 
tween this and the witchcraft mania : for while 



30 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

the latter was due to individual hatred and 
terror, the former was based upon a system- 
atic policy of government. 

Like many apparently yielding people, the 
Quakers were tenacious. Floggings, ear-crop- 
pings, and fines did not discourage them. They 
neither gave up their beliefs nor their habita- 
tions, although many of them did leave Sand- 
wich, for Falmouth, where they were kindly 
received, gently treated, and where they have 
a meeting-house of their own to this day. 

Sandwich, besides being typical of this sec- 
tion of Massachusetts in much of its early his- 
tory, and in much of its characteristic scenery, 
in which woodland, moor, pond, and ocean 
blend in ever-charming, ever-changing vistas, 
is also typical in that it was once the seat of 
manufacturing as well as maritime activities. 
The glass-works, which were established in 
1825, were among the then largest in the world. 
There are still, in many Cape Cod parlors, 
specimens of this Sandwich glass : colored gob- 
lets, engraved pitchers, lamp globes, a sugar 
bowl made by hand for a wedding gift, mir- 



SANDWICH 31 

rors, funny little glass animals in their natural 
colors, blown inside a glass bell, — a perpetual 
mystery to the children who occasionally crept 
into the sacred room to steal a look at the 
marvelous curiosities. There are doors in some 
of the old houses of the old glass-workers with 
engraved glass inset as panels, and many a 
humble cottage glitters with an array of cut- 
glass, for which the blanks were made at Sand- 
wich. There were flint-glass-works in Sand- 
wich, too, the most important industry in the 
county, and a tack factory which was de- 
stroyed by fire in 1883. 

To-day the large manufacturing plant which 
one sees at Sagamore, — one of the "neighbor- 
hoods" of Sandwich, extending over a mile in 
length, and with the usual accompaniment 
near by of employees' houses, — is the largest 
freight-car plant in New England. This Keith 
Car and Manufacturing Company was estab- 
lished as early as 1864, when Sagamore still 
bore the Indian name of Scussett, and the 
founder, Isaac Keith, started the building of 
wagons. Many of the prairie schooners which 



32 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

traveled over the Western desert in '49 were 
built here, notably the one in which Captain 
Sutter had sallied forth to find his spectacular 
fortune of gold. Now ten thousand freight cars 
can be turned out in one year and shipped to 
all parts of the world. And with the Cape Cod 
Canal at its door, the cars may be shipped di- 
rectly from the plant and delivered to their 
destination. 

There is an old wood road, barely visible 
now, which runs straight from Sandwich to 
Falmouth. No automobile could go through 
it: in fact, no automobilist would notice its 
faint traces. But horseback riders, and those 
few folk who love to tramp through the Cape 
woods, know it well. This is the Turpentine 
Road, down which used to be carted the tur- 
pentine made from the pines in this region. 
Those tall pines have fallen under the tongues 
of flames, which have lapped the Cape so many 
times, and scrub oaks have sprung up in their 
place. The turpentine industry is gone, and 
this ancient road, with its three ruts, is fast 
fading into eternal obliteration. 



SANDWICH 33 

It is wholly fitting that the oldest town on 
the Cape should boast the oldest house. If you 
are interested in antiques it will pay you to 
take the Canal Road on your way from Saga- 
more to Sandwich, and make the little detour 
that will bring you to the Tupper house. 

You will recognize it immediately, for its 
sagging framework and small-paned windows 
betray its age as clearly as do the bent form 
and dimming eye of an octogenarian. It was 
built in 1637, and is, without question, the 
oldest house in America, in spite of the claim 
so often made for the old stone Van Rensselaer 
manor house near Albany, New York. It is 
not merely because its years are many that the 
Tupper house deserves a respectful survey: it 
is because they have been honorable as well. 
When you stand under the shadow of the 
venerable door, your feet are resting on the 
very sill where a hundred and thirty-five years 
after the landing of Columbus, Thomas Tup- 
per stood when he became a householder in 
the new little town of Sandwich, and where, 
only this year, there was picked up by a work- 



34 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

man a coin marked 1609. The seven genera- 
tions of Tuppers who have lived there suc- 
cessively for two hundred and sixty-seven 
years have been prominent in the ministry, 
the army, the navy; in medicine and peda- 
gogy. Sir Charles Tupper, who won for him- 
self not only a place in the British peerage, but 
also among the list of Canadian benefactors, 
was only one of this remarkable family, scat- 
tered throughout the length and breadth of 
the land, and which has recently formed itself 
into the Tupper Family Association, to restore 
the old homestead and turn it into a museum. 
Look well at this venerable house. Note the 
chimney — almost twelve feet square. Note, 
too, the mark of the axe on the timbers that 
are exposed, and the good workmanship re- 
vealed in the corners and the ceilings. Houses 
like this one were built without studs, the 
sheathing being nailed perpendicularly to the 
framework of the house. Pick up one of the 
old shingles lying at your feet. It was split by 
hand three hundred years ago, and fastened by 
a hand-made nail. See how the lower, weather- 



SANDWICH 35 

beaten half is worn to half its original thick- 
ness — and yet the shingle is still good. To- 
day we think a w^ooden shingle that will last 
twenty years is exceptionally solid, while our 
modern nail often rusts out in half that time. 
Few modern houses, no matter how costly, 
can claim the beauty of fine workmanship 
which distinguishes this simple homestead. 

There are other points of interest in this 
vicinity: the Daniel Webster Inn, where that 
eloquent statesman used to put up when on 
his frequent and well-loved fishing trips to the 
Cape, and the grave of Joseph Jefferson, the 
actor whose summer home, ''Crow's Nest," 
was for many years at Buzzard's Bay. Jef- 
ferson's grave, in the Bayview Cemetery by 
the side of the country road, is marked by a 
great rough boulder, Avith a bronze medallion 
of his keen, kindly profile on one side, and on 
the other his own words: "And yet we are but 
tenants; let us assure ourselves of this, and then 
it will not be so hard to make room for the new 
administration, for shortly the Great Landlord 
will give us notice that our lease has expired." 



36 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

At Sagamore Beach, where there is quite a 
settlement of summer folk, is also the summer 
headquarters of the Christian Endeavor As- 
sociation, and a favorite place for many con- 
ferences of a progressive nature. 

At East Sandwich the State maintains a fish 
hatchery w^hich is restocking many of the 
ponds of Massachusetts with trout, and also 
experimenting with land-locked and Chinook 
salmon.^ 

The Cape Cod Farm Bureau, which, with 
the assistance of the United States Depart- 
ment of Agriculture and the Agricultural Col- 
lege, is endeavoring to stimulate and instruct 
the farmers of the Cape, not only in the latest 
and best methods of planting and marketing, 
but in cooperation, was organized at Sand- 
wich, and maintained there until its recent re- 
moval to Hyannis. In the Bureau there is a 
Home Economics Department also; so, not 
only the men may profit by the demonstration 
lectures in spraying, pruning, milk-testing, 

^ For a more detailed account see the pages about the Cape 
fisheries, chap. x. 



M 




SANDWICH 37 

soil-testing, compounding fertilizers, packing 
and grading apples, etc., but the boys and girls 
are urged to join garden and canning clubs, 
and the women are assisted in their special 
problems of household management, sanita- 
tion, etc.^ 

These things you can read about when you 
return home. But there is one thing in Sand- 
wich which you cannot read about; that you 
must go to see for yourself, or forever lose. Do 
not leave Sandwich without straying to the 
little graveyard that lies on the sloping hill- 
side, jutting into the lake. You will see the 
ancient stones peacefully slanting against the 
rays of the setting sun, bearing inscriptions 
almost obliterated by the finger of time. You 
will see the willows fringing the tranquil 
waters, and a spire that will remind you of the 
best of Sir Christopher Wren's fine modeling, 
white against the soft blue sky. You will see 
two dark, thimble-shaped linden trees, curi- 
ous accents against the paler background. 

^ For a more detailed account of the Agricultural Awaken- 
ing of the Cape, see chap. ix. 



38 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

And as you linger in the quiet yet cheerful 
spot you will, perhaps, see the prettiest of 
white boats slip out from a bridge that might 
have been copied from a Chinese plate and 
slide across the water. 

You will see these things, and then, if you 
will close your eyes and open your spirit, you 
will feel the peace that comes from a place 
ineffably lovely, ineffably serene. A place 
which men chose as beautiful and set aside as 
sacred three hundred years ago, and where 
for three throbbing centuries good men and 
good women have been laid reverently to rest. 



^P^5g 





Chapter IV 
BARNSTABLE -THE COUNTY SEAT 

IF you should imagine a long picture gal- 
lery — three centuries long, and as wide 
as from the Atlantic to the Pacific — hung 
with American types, from the Indian and the 
Puritan to the twentieth-century business 
man, you would, if you had a correct view of 
such a gallery, notice that not an inconsider- 
able portion of it would be occupied by the 
New England type, in various phases of its 
development. And you would be struck by 
even a more detailed classification: the Cape 
Cod type. Perhaps, however, in order to study 
this specialized group, it would be better to 
transfer our imaginations from a national pic- 
ture gallery to a local one; and what more suit- 



40 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

able place than the gracious and sedate county 
seat of Barnstable? 

Barnstable has been the home of many dis- 
tinguished men: James Otis, Samuel A. Otis 
(member of Congress and father of Harrison 
Gray Otis), Solicitor-General Davis, Samuel 
Shaw, Mr. Palfrey (the historian), Governor 
Hinckley, and Nymphas Marston among 
them. If we step inside the handsome, gray- 
pillared court-house, we shall find here, in 
looking over the ancient records and the yel- 
lowing pictures, portraits from which we our- 
selves will evolve an imaginative gallery. 

First of all we shall hang the portrait of the 
Indian; not only because he was the first in- 
habitant of this region, but because he still 
persists upon it. You may see him any day — 
not in pure-blooded impressiveness, to be sure, 
yet with the straight black hair, the erect car- 
riage, and the numberless small traits which 
characterize the people of Mashpee.^ 

Next we shall hang the pioneer: of pure Eng- 
lish descent, of high order of intelligence; 

^ See chap, xvii, "A Forgotten Corner of Cape Cod." 



BARNSTABLE 41 

grave, severe, upright. Perhaps we may be 
forgiven if we now put two smaller pictures 
close to this one; for, after all, the Puritan was 
not the only man who came to the new colo- 
nies. Looking back to those early days we are 
very apt to forget that there were along with 
the band of sterner personages a number of 
wits and scamps and wags, seeking adventure 
rather than religion, and freedom from re- 
sponsibility rather than assumption of it. 
After the Revolution the reaction against the 
Puritans encouraged more and more recruits 
to this jolly crew. They had big Saxon hearts; 
they tasted wine with Yorick at the tavern, 
and afterward went their way to Yorick's fate 
in the graveyard. As they did not write the 
records, we learn of them chiefly between the 
fading lines of fines and trials. They were 
never stanch upholders of the Church, in an 
age when not to be so was a decided disgrace. 
Stalwart and rollicking, they infuse a certain 
ruddy tang into the austere color of those 
early days. Let us give them some remem- 
brance in our gallery. 



42 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

And beside them a small portrait, but a 
definite one — the high-bred eccentric, sent 
over to the colonies by some distracted family, 
glad to find an asylum for a peculiar member. 
''Characters" they were often called, and their 
successors still flavor many a New England 
village. 

Another portrait, too frequently neglected 
by the historians, must hang in this line: a 
dark face, laughing and yet sorrowful, — the 
face of the negro. The people of Massachusetts 
have liked to believe that slavery had a very 
light and very brief hold upon this soil. Rec- 
ords, however, testify all too distinctly that 
our Puritan fathers, doubtless considering 
themselves the elect to w^hom God had given 
the heathen for an inheritance, not only en- 
slaved captured Indians, but sold them to 
work in the tropics, where they died almost 
immediately; that they obtained negroes by 
importation, purchase, and exchange; that 
they condemned criminals into slavery as 
punishment; and that they even enslaved the 
Quakers at one time. Neither was this a priv- 



BARNSTABLE 43 

ate speculation, but an enterprise of the au- 
thorities of the colony, and existed for over a 
century and a half without serious challenge. 
Cotton Mather illustrates the temper of the 
times toward the Indians in his "Magnalia," 
in which he explains: "We know not when or 
how these Indians first became inhabitants of 
this mighty continent, yet we may guess that 
probably the Devil decoyed these miserable 
savages hither, in hope that the gospel of the 
Lord Jesus Christ would never come to de- 
stroy or disturb his absolute Empire over 
them." 

In the will of John Bacon, of Barnstable, 
made in 1730, we get another inimitable speci- 
men of the inconsistency then current. This 
John Bacon gives to his wife the "use and im- 
provement" of the slave Dinah for her life- 
time, and if "at the death of my said wife, 
Dinah be still living, I direct my executors to 
sell her, and to use and improve the money for 
which she is sold in the purchase of Bibles, and 
distribute them equally among my said wife's 
and my grandchildren." 



44 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

About 1780 slavery became unprofitable 
and therefore unpopular in this climate, but it 
was not until President Lincoln's Proclama- 
tion that it was entirely abolished — a fact 
which it would be salutary for many a too 
emphatic New England abolitionist to remem- 
ber. 

Before we leave this era let us place one 
more vivid and forever romantic picture 
against the wall : it is of a young woman, seated 
upon a scarlet blanket upon a snow-white bull. 
Before her walks the newly made bridegroom, 
for this is a bridal procession, and John Alden 
is leading his wife — she who was Priscilla 
Mullen of Barnstable — back to the Plymouth 
Colony; surely a picturesque flash in the som- 
ber annals of that early history. 

If we pass over two hundred years we shall 
recognize anew many of the qualities which 
distinguish the first settlers. The portraits we 
place against the wall are still of those of pure 
English descent. They have married and inter- 
married until nearly every one calls nearly 
every one else by his or her first name. Uncle 



BARNSTABLE 45 

Simon and Aunt Lizzie and Cousin Abbie are 
as frequent here as colonels in Kentucky. They 
are thrifty, law-abiding, intelligent. Their 
humor is as sharp and dry as the sand on 
which they live. They are excellently well in- 
formed. And why not, when every other 
family boasts a member who has sailed around 
the world and kept his eyes open as he went, 
bringing back more than silk and fans and 
coral from his visit to distant shores.^ In 1880 
a case was tried in Barnstable, for which a 
lawyer from a distance was summoned. Dur- 
ing the course of his argument he implied that 
probably none of the jury knew of procedures 
beyond their own dooryards. Rather nettled 
by the assumption, some one took the trouble 
to inquire about that particular jury, and found 
that eleven out of the twelve had been all over 
the world, either as masters of their own ves- 
sels or in some business capacity. The twelfth 
was a substantial farmer. And such an as- 
sortment of men was by no means an extra- 
ordinary thing. 

We do not over-estimate the intelligence of 



46 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

these Cape-Codders. Practically every ener- 
getic man took long sea voyages, coming back 
with new ideas and broad opinions. In 1839 
two hundred and fifty of its citizens were 
masters or mates of some of the finest ships in 
the Union. They not only raised the mental 
standard of the community to which they so 
faithfully returned and to which they brought 
so generously of their cosmopolitan collec- 
tions, but they were judges of tea and silk and 
coal and manufactured goods. They were 
commercial pioneers: they gambled on car- 
goes, and sometimes made a fortune on a 
single voyage. They were the forerunners of 
the Americans who have conceived the big 
commercial ideas and carried them out; who 
later built railroads across the continent, and 
laid telegraph wires under the sea. It was a 
Cape-Codder who sent a ship-load of babies' 
cradles around the Horn in '48 to California, 
and sold them at fabulous prices to serve as 
"rockers" for gold mines, just as the first 
fever of '49 began. And it was another who 
sent ice to the tropics where such a thing had 



BARNSTABLE 47 

never been heard of and where profits of one 
thousand per cent were made. Besides their 
intelligence, the Cape-Codders have always 
been a conspicuously law-abiding folk. Thor- 
eau observed w^hen he passed through Barn- 
stable that the jail w^as "to let." It might fre- 
quently have been marked so, for it is hard to 
imagine communities less inclined to litigation 
and more habituated to minding their own 
business and not interfering with their neigh- 
bors. There are, of course, opportunities of 
disputes concerning cranberry flowage statutes, 
fishing and beach privileges, etc. But not- 
withstanding their admirable record for valor 
both on the seas and in fighting the enemy, 
their respect for order has always prevailed. 

In spite of their good behavior at home — 
possibly because of it.^ — they were rovers. 
One cannot scour the globe and hug one's 
hearthstone at the same time. But although 
they sailed away, — and, when the sailing and 
fishing interests declined, went away by land 
to seek fame and fortune and to find it, 
they never forgot the smell of the salt marsh in 



48 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

haying-time, or the cool of the misty moors ; 
the trailing arbutus in spring, or the sight of 
the '* white-winged birds" as the Indians love 
to call the sailing vessels. Just as the merchant 
from Detroit comes back to his native birth- 
place at Hyannis or Bourne, so his grand- 
father and his great grandfather found their 
w^ay back after their trips to India and Ceylon, 
and settled down to end their days within 
sight of the tranquil shore. 

This is the Cape-Codder that the historian 
has delighted to honor; that the novelists have 
eagerly depicted; that the cartoonists have 
jocularly portrayed with web feet combing his 
hair with a codfish bone. Until 1895 ninety 
per cent of the population of Cape Cod was 
native-born of pure English stock, maintain- 
ing to a remarkable degree the quintessence 
of New England characteristics with the wider 
virtue of Americanism. 

But with the influx of summer people — 
about fifteen or twenty years ago — a change 
has crept through the veins of the race. The 
most radical ethnical change that has occurred 



BARNSTABLE 49 

since the beginning of her history is in process, 
and it is coming about in such a silent, incon- 
spicuous way that even those it affects most 
vitally have as yet hardly realized it. The 
time has come to hang another portrait on the 
walls of the picture gallery : that of a newcomer 
with physiognomy and complexion quite as 
different from the Anglo-Saxon as the Anglo- 
Saxon from the aborigines. 

Would you be surprised to know that, in a 
certain graduating class in a public school in 
the township of Falmouth, fifty of the children 
were Portuguese and but ten were American.^ 
Would you be surprised to know that there 
are Roman Catholic churches in Barnstable 
where only Portuguese attend, and Protestant 
ones where Finns are the only communicants.^ 
One sixth of the population is foreign in the 
town of Barnstable; in certain neighborhoods, 
one half. What a change from the old days 
when a dark-skinned newcomer was a curios- 
ity! 

With the exception of Provincetown, Barn- 
stable has probably the greatest number of 



50 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

Portuguese of any town on the Cape, their 
advent here being similar to their advent in 
many of the small towns where they have now 
firmly established themselves. 

The newcomers are usually a small group, 
say half a dozen single men, who appear in the 
press of the cranberry season when their serv- 
ices are gratefully accepted. They find ac- 
commodation in some old barn or shed, where 
they live peaceably enough, the sound of danc- 
ing and of a crude guitar on a summer eve- 
ning being the only thing which proclaims 
their presence. They buy milk from a near-by 
farmer and are punctilious in their payments. 
Once established, they proceed to make them- 
selves extremely useful. They pick strawber- 
ries, blueberries, cranberries, and beach plums 
in due succession. In the winter they gather 
shellfish. And in the spring they import a wife 
and children from Sao Miguel or from Lisbon, 
buy some abandoned farmhouse, and move 
in. The land that has lain fallow for a decade 
is coaxed into fertility. Besides tending their 
garden patches and their houses they work all 



BARNSTABLE 51 

day like beavers. The man teams, fishes, goes 
out for "day's work," and picks berries. A 
quick Portuguese can earn as much as three 
dollars a day in blueberry season. The wife 
goes out scrubbing or takes in washing. Every 
single child hies to the woods and picks berries 
like mad all summer and goes to school all 
winter. And presto! in half a dozen years the 
village, which was almost deserted, resounds 
to a voluble dialect. The school which boasted 
ten pupils has twenty-five — more than half 
of them with unpronounceable, three-syllable 
names. Gradually the community which sur- 
veyed the intruders with resentment succumbs 
to force of numbers. The Portuguese youth, 
educated side by side with the Yankee maiden, 
falls in love with her, and marriage is the 
sequel. 

It is largely a matter of numbers. Where 
there are few Portuguese, as in neighborhoods 
in Bourne, they have no social standing. The 
natives even refuse to pick berries on the bogs 
with them at cranberry-time. But where they 
outnumber the original inhabitants, as in 



52 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

Provincetown, we get the other side of the 
shield. They become storekeepers; the girls 
go to normal school and attain a teacher's 
diploma, and intermarriage follows quite na- 
turally. 

While the Portuguese are scattered all over 
the Cape, the Finns are gathered chiefly in 
Barnstable. They are a quiet and industrious 
people, with a desire and capacity for educa- 
tion; and they bring with them many of the 
admirable traces of their own civilization. 
Their entrance into a village is similar to that 
of the Portuguese, but it is doubtful if they 
will ever reach such large numbers. They are 
so intelligent and thrifty that some of the most 
progressive farmers from other towns have 
found it worth their while to import them — 
giving them house-room for the sake of serv- 
ices which later they may hire from them and 
their numerous children. 

Thus, as the sons and daughters of the Cape 
have wandered inland, as their progenitors 
wandered seaward, to win fame and fortune, a 
comely and a quiet race has humbly taken pos- 



BARNSTABLE 53 

session of the deserted houses and is patiently 
and with infinite persistence making the hght 
but productive soil to blossom like the rose. 
So, to the Portuguese and the Finn must surely 
be granted the next place in the picture gal- 
lery of the Cape. 

The final place in the gallery would belong 
to a group affording quite an amusing con- 
trast — that of a prosperous business man, 
his well-dressed wife, and a group of young 
folks, children and guests, with tennis rackets, 
riding-whips, and the other insignia of sum- 
mer recreation. For popular as all the Cape 
is, and permeating as are the presence and in- 
fluence of the summer colonists throughout the 
county, yet the spacious township of Barn- 
stable is especially favored, not so much with 
boarding-houses and hotels, but with hand- 
some estates and substantial summer homes of 
a large and cosmopolitan population. Hyan- 
nis, with its fashionable shops, where you may 
buy Italian furniture or Brittany pottery or 
Japanese novelties; Osterville, Centerville, 
Wianno, — about a dozen or so progressive 



54 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

villages, — are all part of Barnstable, and are 
rich with modern houses, shaven lawns, and 
commodious garages. You may travel for 
miles through them along a well-oiled highway 
catching glimpses of well-kept gardens and 
hospitable residences across the white fences 
or the vine-clad stone walls. 

Hyannis, although technically a village in 
the town of Barnstable, is such a thriving place 
that one cannot slip over it with a mere men- 
tion. Its original Indian name of lyannough, 
in honor of the young sachem who first re- 
ceived the colonists, has passed through the 
modifications of Janno, lanno, Hyanno, to 
the present Hyannis, which pleasantly recalls 
the Indian syllables « With its all-the-y ear- 
round population of 4500; wdth its Board of 
Trade, Women's Club, Sunday Evening Lec- 
tures, and its world-famous Normal School,^ 
it is a place of modernity. The headquarters 
of Barnstable Council Boy Scouts of America 
is at Hyannis. The Boy Scouts on the Cape 
number sixteen troops, with an enrollment of 

^ See chap, xiv, "Harwich and the Cape Cod Schools." 



BARNSTABLE 55 

two hundred and sixteen boys and eighty men. 
The headquarters of the Barnstable Y.M.C.A. 
have recently been removed from Sagamore 
to Hyannis, and the Cape Cod Farm Bureau 
has made the same change from Sandwich. For 
the rest, there are summer hotels, golf courses, 
tennis courts, moving pictures — quite an 
amazing development for a village which in 
1850 had only nine letter boxes in its post- 
office. One should not leave Hyannis without 
a trip to Shoot Flying Hill, five miles away, 
from which, on a clear day, one may see all 
Cape Cod, and the entire mainland as far 
north as Plymouth, stretching out in a living 
map at one's feet. 

Thus the long picture gallery of Barnstable 
brings us up to the present day. First the 
pioneer, both the Puritan and the adventurer; 
then the thrifty, intelligent "first inhabitants" 
with their sea captains and sailors and patriots, 
whose descendants live on to this day in the 
old homesteads; then the voluble Portuguese 
and the industrious Finns; and finally the 
generous army of summer folk, who, although 



56 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

they return in the fall to distant cities from 
Boston to St. Louis, still love to call the Cape 
"home." 

Besides being the center of the racial melt- 
ing-pot, Barnstable has some fair sights, chief 
among them being the sweep of the marshes — 
green in summer, russet in the fall — from 
which the town received its original name of 
''Great Marshes." The court-house, too, 
standing on its dignified eminence, is of goodly 
proportions, and is the inspiration and reposi- 
tory of many legends. It was built in 1832, 
and has been twice enlarged. The bell which 
the first edifice — the court-house — bore was 
cast in Munich, and bore the inscription, *'Si 
Deus pro nos, quis contra nos, 1675," recalling 
the tragedy of Captain Peter Adolphe, who had 
been cast away on the shore in 1697 or '98, 
and whose body was recovered and buried at 
Sandwich. His widow, in grateful remem- 
brance of the reverent rites accorded her hus- 
band, — who had been a stranger in a strange 
land, indeed, — presented the citizens with 
the bell, which hung in the tower of the old 



BARNSTABLE 57 

meeting-house for thirty years. In 1703 it was 
sold to buy a larger one. Barnstable County 
purchased it, and it is now preserved in the 
office of the clerk of the courts, where visitors 
may admire its lovely shape and exquisite 
chasing. The court-house overlooks the very 
harbor where, in July, 1621, a party of men 
from the Plymouth Colony came in a shallop, 
commanded by Miles Standish, in search of 
a boy who had been lost in the woods. This 
lad had fallen in with a group of Indians who 
had taken him to Nauset, now Eastham. This 
same group of Indians conducted the searching 
party to Eastham also, found the boy for them, 
and took a courteous farewell. 

After this Barnstable was often visited by 
the Plymouth colonists on their expeditions 
to buy corn, until it was definitely settled in 
1639 on the usual conditions and with the cus- 
tomary restrictions. The church was estab- 
lished early, and although no building was 
erected, tradition points to a place on the high- 
way between Barnstable and West Barnstable 
where once stood a huge rock. Here, under the 



58 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

shadow of the roadside oaks and pines, the 
devout met and worshiped — more Hke Greeks 
in their leafy temples than they probably 
realized. 

It is pleasant to recall that although Barn- 
stable was christened in memory of the sea- 
port in Devonshire near the Bristol Channel, 
yet the name of the young sachem who first 
received the colonists, lyannough, is still per- 
petuated in the town of Hyannis, an incident 
that recalls that, after all, the first portrait to 
lead the picture gallery is that of the red man, 
who, before Pilgrim or Portuguese or summer 
visitor, gazed out over the wind-licked marshes 
of the spacious town of Barnstable and called 
them his own. 




Chapter V 



YARMOUTH AND CAPE COD METHODISM 

YARMOUTH, named for a seaport in 
Norfolk, England, is the elbow town of 
the Cape: from here, Barnstable County be- 
gins to widen and the soil to thicken. And 
here, too, we find various phases of Cape his- 
tory sharply accented. 

Although Yarmouth is the third oldest town 
on the Cape, — being incorporated with Sand- 
wich and Barnstable in 1639, its Revolutionary 
history stirring, and the record of its various 
industries of whaling and seafaring most vigor- 
ous, — yet it is neither through its civil nor 
economic history that Yarmouth has won its 



60 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

special fame. That fame rests on its being the 
great camp-meeting center of Cape Cod. Here, 
in the Millennium Grove, every year for a 
week, men, women, and children congregate 
in a sort of extended revival meeting, getting 
and giving fresh impetus to religious progress, 
and to the progress of Methodism through all 
New England. 

It was South Wellfleet that held the first 
camp meeting on Cape Cod. This was in 1819, 
and was followed by religious revivals in Prov- 
incetown and Eastham. In 1826 the encamp- 
ment was held at Truro, and two years later 
it moved to Eastham. It is from this latter 
place that the history of the Methodist Epis- 
copal Church on Cape Cod really dates, and 
as we see the white-spired churches, dotting 
the scattered hamlets all through Barnstable 
County, we cannot help but be struck by the 
significance of the religion which ever since its 
inception has been unbrokenly characteristic 
of this region. 

The early days at Eastham were marked by 
fervor and discomfort. One who decided to 



YARMOUTH AND METHODISM 61 

attend the camp meeting first had to drive to 
Barnstable; from there take a vessel to East- 
ham; row from the vessel to shallow water; be 
carted through the shallow water by a farm 
wagon ; and then walk a mile through the sand 
to the Camp-Meeting Grounds. There were 
no cottages; no tabernacle. The seats were of 
bare planks without backs, and the preachers 
slept on the floor — on straw — ^ in a wooden 
shack. There was but one well on the grounds, 
and one man was commissioned to do all the 
pumping for those who wanted water. In the 
morning one saw the reenactment of ancient 
Biblical scenes, in the scores and scores of per- 
sons, waiting with their bowls and pitchers to 
be served with the water that was to last them 
through the day. 

Strenuous as this regime was, nevertheless 
the Camp-Meeting Ground at Eastham held 
its own for thirty years. Then it was moved 
to Yarmouth, the extension of the Old Colony 
Railroad down to this point making it an 
accessible gathering-place. In August, 1863, 
the first camp meeting at Yarmouth was 



62 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

held, and they have been held there ever since 
without interruption. 

The past always, merely by becoming past, 
gathers a halo of romance around it. The stern 
old pioneers who trudged through both sand 
and water to get to Eastham ; who sat on bare 
planks to listen to the long discourses, and who 
slept without a murmur on the straw; who 
waited interminably in the morning for their 
portion of fresh water — doubtless viewed with 
contempt the softer accommodations of Yar- 
mouth. But we, to whom the first Yarmouth 
days are almost as far away as the first East- 
ham ones, look back at them both with curi- 
osity. 

To-day there are cottages and concrete walks 
and booths at the Camp-Meeting Grounds. 
There is a keeper's house, and an association 
building, and a commodious wooden taber- 
nacle which holds about five hundred people. 
But there are plenty of Cape-Codders who will 
tell you of the days when there were no such 
conveniences. It was only thirty-odd years 
ago that camp-meeting season saw a whole 



YARMOUTH AND METHODISM 63 

host of tents, dotting the grounds hke mush- 
rooms. People came from far and near — 
fathers, mothers, children, aunts, and grand- 
mothers. They brought their own tents and 
huge boxes full of provisions — roast chicken 
and cookies and apples and sandwiches — 
enough to feed them during their entire ten 
days' stay. Those who did not own their own 
tents were apportioned off into those of their 
church; for nearly every church had its tent, 
divided down the middle, with accommoda- 
tions for the men on one side of the dividing 
line and for the women on the other. Then 
followed revivalists' meetings, prayer meet- 
ings, experience meetings. There were conver- 
sions and sermons and rousing chorus singings. 
It was the fashion for good church members 
to come every year, bringing their entire 
families, from infants in arms to helpless old 
folk. 

It is changed now. The tents have given 
place to cottages, built in the curious jigsaw 
architecture characteristic of such edifices. 
After the camp-meeting season is over, and 



64 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

before it begins, the cottages are rented by the 
association to people who may or may not have 
reHgious affihations. There is less spectacular 
exhortation, and more of the tone of a serious 
conference. The picnic spirit has waned some- 
what : most of the children are left at home, and 
many of the merely curious have had their 
curiosity satisfied by now, or go elsewhere for 
excitement. 

And yet we must not underestimate the 
value of the camp meeting to the vital life of 
the Cape. One cannot appreciate the caliber 
of a people, their temperament, nor their ma- 
terial progress without understanding some- 
thing of their religion. Methodism began to 
gather power in this section of the country in 
the latter part of the eighteenth century, as a 
reaction from the formalism of the Church of 
England. The austere meeting-houses and the 
impassioned preaching were the expressions of 
a people to whom dignified ritualism and Old- 
World conventionalities had grown wearisome. 
What these Cape-Codders wanted was ''relig- 
ion in earnest," as Southey said, and that is 



YARMOUTH AND METHODISM 65 

what they got. People who traveled great and 
difficult distances to hear a preacher were 
entirely willing to listen to him for a long time. 
Two and three hour discourses were not in 
the least boresome to them. Obviously no 
summary of the Cape is complete without 
mention of this strong and simple religious 
feeling which sustained a strong and simple 
people so admirably for two hundred years. 

Besides its camp-meeting activities Yar- 
mouth has always maintained a conspicuous 
church life. The inevitable concomitant of 
small rivalries, schisms, etc., although they 
fill many pages of the early records, are hap- 
pily forgotten by now; and although many di- 
visions have grown out from the original organi- 
zation, the essential only has been preserved, 
and its growth has extended with the years. 
It is characteristic that the first church build- 
ing antedated the incorporation of the town- 
ship by several months. It stood on the place 
called Fort Hill, and was merely a log house, 
thirty feet by forty, with oiled paper in place 
of glass in the windows. Hither the faithful 



66 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

were summoned by the beating on a drum, and 
those who were not faithful, but "denied the 
Scriptures to be the rule of life," received cor- 
poral punishment at the hands of the magis- 
trates. People came from miles around to at- 
tend church: in storm as well as in sunshine. 
At first they came on foot, but as animals in- 
creased the better conditioned came on horse- 
back. The old custom, which still exists in 
certain primitive parts of the South of ''riding 
and tying," was part of the quaint Sunday 
morning procession in those days. The hus- 
band and wife started out together on the same 
horse, he with his musket and she riding be- 
hind him. At the end of a few miles, they dis- 
mounted, tied their horse, leaving it for the 
couple behind them, and walked on. When the 
second pair caught up with them they in turn 
dismounted, and walked on, and the first cou- 
ple rode again for a certain distance, leaving 
the horse behind as before. Thus one horse 
transferred four saddle passengers to and from 
the place of worship. The first minister here 
was Marmaduke Matthews, the eloquent 



YARMOUTH AND METHODISM 67 

Welshman who was matriculated at All Souls' 
College at Oxford, and who came to New Eng- 
land in 1638 — a proof that culture was not 
lacking on the Cape in those early days. But 
culture was not exclusive. There were two 
hundred praying Indians here between 1667 
and 1699, under the ministry of the Reverend 
Thomas Thornton and two native preachers. 
They had their own meeting-house, northeast of 
the *' Swans Pond," just above a spring where 
Eliot preached to them. In the southern part 
of Yarmouth there was an Indian Reserva- 
tion, and as late as 1779 there was a small 
cluster of wigwams in the southeast part of 
the town, which were inhabitated by the Paw- 
kannawkut Indians. The original name of 
Yarmouth was an Indian one, Mattacheese, 
which is an Indian name signifying ''old lands" 
or ''planting -lands." When the terminal was 
added, it meant "by the water." Thus, Mat- 
tacheeset meant "planting-lands by the border 
of the water." For years the northeast sec- 
tion of the town was known as "Hokkanom." 
And certainly one of the best proofs of the 



68 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

salutary influence of the church Hfe is that 
these red men were uniformly well treated in 
the town. 

The first church was followed by a second 
and a third, this last with a high pulpit and 
a sounding-board and pews — marks of prog- 
ress. It stood on the county road, and during 
the Revolution was decorated with a tower- 
ing liberty pole. Later this building fell into 
temporal use, being used for a store and a post- 
office, but its steeple remained an important 
landmark for vessels. It was finally burned, 
and in 1870 the present Methodist Church was 
built. There are five churches in Yarmouth 
to-day, among them a Roman Catholic, — the 
Sacred Heart, dedicated in 1902, — a Univer- 
salist, and a Swedenborgian. (What would 
the first settlers say to that, one wonders!) 
And the town also has the honor of forming, 
in 1817, the second temperance society in the 
country. 

Many eminent men are associated with the 
history of Yarmouth: not only admirable sea 
captains and shipmasters whose names are 



YARMOUTH AND METHODISM 69 

chiefly remembered by their descendants, but 
men Uke Timothy Alden, direct descendant of 
John. He occupied for nearly sixty years the 
pulpit left vacant by Marmaduke Matthews. 
Joseph White, the grandson of Peregrine 
White, lived at Yarmouth and died there in 
1782 in his seventy-ninth year, leaving behind 
him a staff, about three feet long, with a brazen 
foot and a wooden head, w^hich one of the com- 
pany of our forefathers had in his hand when 
he stepped on the well-known rock at Ply- 
mouth. 

When the town was incorporated in 1638, by 
settlers from Saugus, there were eight college 
graduates among them. John Miller, who is 
mentioned in Mather's "Magnalia" as one 
of the eighty-seven ministers who had been 
in the ministry before embarking to America, 
was probably the first minister at Yarmouth. 
John Cotton was settled here iri 1693 — dying 
here twelve years later. Anthony Thatcher — 
famous through Whittier's poem, the ''Swan 
Song of Parson Avery" — came to Yarmouth 
in 1639, and for eight generations his descend- 



70 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

ants have continued to exercise a wide influ- 
ence in the affairs of town and State. John 
Crow, whose name began to be written "Crow- 
ell" in the third generation, was also one of 
the first settlers, as were the gallant sailor Asa 
Eldridge, Thomas Howes, Andrew Hallett, 
William Eldridge, Thomas Hatch, and others 
whose names are still conspicuous all over the 
Cape. 

Besides distinguished men, Yarmouth has 
its quota of fine houses. The Chandler Gary 
house, which was torn down in May, 1899, after 
reaching the goodly age of two hundred years, 
revealed bullets embedded in the walls. If 
any house was ever worthy of this distinction 
surely this was, for it was here that the loyal 
mothers and daughters of Yarmouth gath- 
ered on the night preceding the march to 
Dorchester Heights, and melted up their pew- 
ter dishes into bullets to supply their husbands 
and sons. And the next day saw eighty-one 
men, half the effective force of the town, 
marching to Boston under the leadership of 
Captain Joshua Gray. 



YARMOUTH AND METHODISM 71 

The common schools at Yarmouth were 
among the first on the Cape, and were — and 
still are — uniformly excellent. Whaling, cod- 
fishing, turpentine gathered from the forests, 
and salt manufacturing brought good business 
to the town for fifty years. Then, because of 
the abolition of duties on foreign salt and the 
development of source and supply in our own 
country, this industry ceased to be profitable.^ 
Fishing and shipbuilding came to an end with 
the Civil War, the latter partly because of the 
exhaustion of the timber supply. 

The record of Yarmouth is an honorable 
one. Famous fishers of men and famous fish- 
ers of the deep have both left their clean rec- 
ords, their self-respecting descendants, and 
their substantial houses. Worldly wealth has 
descended in many instances, and accounts for 
the air of easy-going comfort in the place to 
tell us of the past. And the treasure in heaven, 
for which this community so zealously labored, 
has also gathered interest, and still accrues to 
the glory and the credit of the town. 

1 See chap. vi. 




Chapter VI 



NEW INDUSTRIES AND OLD IN DENNIS 

THOUSANDS and thousands of years ago 
— so the fable runs — there was an enor- 
mous eagle, quite as enormous as the roc in 
Sinbad the Sailor's tale. He used to hover 
over the South Shore of Cape Cod, and when- 
ever he saw little children playing, he would 
pounce down upon them and carry one away 
in his terrible iron talons. Maushope was an 
Indian giant — gentle and huge. Unlike most 
of the giants of folk-lore, he loved little boys 
and girls, and the onslaughts of the eagle en- 
raged him. He brooded and brooded over them, 
and one day as the eagle flapped away with a 
screaming child in his claws, Maushope started 



INDUSTRIES IN DENNIS 73 

to chase him. The bird flew out to sea, and 
the giant strode after him. Farther and farther 
flew the bird: deeper and deeper waded the 
giant — but, of course, since he was a giant he 
could wade into the very depths of the ocean. 
By and by he came to Nantucket, which until 
that time had never been known to the in- 
habitants of the mainland. And there, under 
a tree, he found the bones of all the children 
the eagle had devoured. He sat down beside 
them and grieved for a long time. Finally he 
thought he would feel better if he had a smoke, 
but he searched the island in vain for tobacco. 
So he filled his pipe with poke — a weed that, 
ever since that time, the Indians have used 
as a substitute. He smoked and he smoked, 
and the smoke drifted back across the sound 
to the mainland. That was the beginning of 
fogs on Cape Cod, and that is what the abo- 
rigines meant when they said, "Old Maushope 
is smoking his pipe." 

The moist fumes of Maushope's pipe pene- 
trate every corner of Cape Cod, but at Dennis 
they come less frequently than at most other 



74 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

places. For Dennis is high, — Scargo Hill is 
the highest elevation in Barnstable County, 
— and this is probably the reason that Dennis 
was among the first of the Cape Cod towns to 
attract summer people. 

It is an interesting coincidence that the two 
largest industries on the Cape to-day — sum- 
mer people and cranberries — had their ori- 
gin in the very place where the two earliest 
industries — fishing and salt-making — were 
also conspicuously vigorous. This placid little 
town of Dennis, which automobilists whiz 
through without special attention, had, in 
1865, a fishing fleet of forty-eight vessels and 
seven hundred and twenty-two men, represent- 
ing one hundred and seventeen thousand dol- 
lars of capital. There was a coastwise fleet 
also of eighty-five vessels and four hundred 
and forty-five men. Nearly twelve hundred 
men sailed from this one port alone, and thirty 
years before one hundred and fifty skippers 
sailing from various American ports all claimed 
Dennis as their home. They often took their 
wives with them in those jovial days, and came 



INDUSTRIES IN DENNIS 75 

back with jars of Chinese sweetmeats, shim- 
mering Indian stuffs, tamarinds, cocoanuts, 
parrots, fans, feathers, spicy wood, and great 
shells. One likes to picture the friendly com- 
motion which such advents and departures 
caused in the little village. Fast and famous 
clippers were built here, also, by the Shiver- 
icks; more than one of them noted for their 
swift voyages from Calcutta to San Francisco. 

But although Dennis made an excellent and 
honorable livelihood out of the ocean, this does 
not distinguish her from half a dozen other 
Cape towns. It is her experiments with solar 
evaporation of sea- water for salt and her dis- 
covery of the value of the cranberry that give 
the quiet hamlet a place in the economic his- 
tory of the country. 

In 1855 there were one hundred and sixty- 
five salt manufactories on Cape Cod, and 
eighty -five in Dennis alone, turning out thirty- 
four thousand bushels of salt annually. All 
over the Cape, and especially around this 
region of Dennis, there stood on the hills which 
overlooked the sea windmills which pumped 



76 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

sea-water into wooden vats for the making of 
salt. On the lowlands were acres of these vats, 
their conical-shaped roofs contributing an odd 
touch to the landscape. When it rained there 
was a great stampede to close the vats and 
keep out the fresh water. 

It all started in 1776 when Captain John 
Sears, from that part of Dennis which went 
under the attractive name of "Suet," con- 
structed the first experimental salt vat on 
Cape Cod. His experience was similar to that 
of most inventors: the first year the works 
leaked, and every one laughed at them, call- 
ing them " Sears 's Folly." The second year he 
obtained thirty bushels of salt ; the fourth year 
a hand pump was introduced in place of the 
buckets which had formerly been used to pour 
water into the vats. In 1785 a wind pump 
was contrived with the assistance of Captain 
Nathaniel Freeman, of Harwich. Eight years 
later Mr. Reuben Sears, of Harwich, invented 
the shives, or rollers, for the covers which pro- 
tected the vat from the rain. After that com- 
petition sprang up fast and furious, and im- 



INDUSTRIES IN DENNIS 77 

provements were constantly made — greatly 
to the chagrin of the original inventors, but 
highly advantageous to the community. The 
industry assumed significant proportions; the 
salt produced by this system of solar evapora- 
tion resembling Lisbon salt — pure, strong, 
and free from lime; also Glauber's salt from 
crystallization in winter. It took three hun- 
dred and fifty gallons of sea-water to make a 
bushel of salt, and at one time — in 1783 — 
salt sold for eight dollars a bushel. Three 
years before this the General Court tried to 
encourage the idea of manufacture by offering 
a bounty of three shillings for every bushel 
produced. At one time there was over two 
million dollars invested in these various salt- 
works. And then the decline came. This was 
partly due to the increased value of the pine 
which came from Maine, necessary for mak- 
ing the vats. As the various salt-works w^ent 
out of business the lumber was taken and con- 
verted into buildings. And more than one 
possessor of a barn or shed, constructed of 
these timbers, may still be heard complaining 



78 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

because no nail will last long in the salt-soaked 
wood, but rusts out in short order, even after 
all these years. 

Unfortunately, the policy of the National 
Government was not consistent toward this 
industry, sometimes encouraging it by placing 
a high duty on imported salt, and at other 
times reducing the impost. The bounty of- 
fered by the State in the infancy of the indus- 
try was afterwards withdrawn. The develop- 
ment of salt springs in New York and other 
places also tended to make the business less 
profitable. Thus it gradually and steadily 
declined. 

But exciting as the invention of the salt- 
works was to the small town, which suddenly 
found itself in competition with Russia and 
Sicily, it was the land and not the water which 
bestowed upon Cape Cod her most modern 
and permanent financial status. This was the 
cultivation of the cranberry, which was first 
thought of by Henry Hall, an inhabitant of 
Dennis, about eighty years ago. 

Every visitor to the Cape has been struck 



INDUSTRIES IN DENNIS 79 

by the strange and singular beauty of the low 
flat bogs, perfectly level, covered with a thick, 
close vine, with red berries gleaming against 
the white sand in autumn, and the vines red- 
dening, too, as the season advances, giving a 
unique touch to the landscape, dear to the 
heart of the Cape-Codder. You see them 
everywhere — these bogs : tucked under the 
protection of a hill; skirting a stream; lying in 
winding valleys below the level of the carriage 
roads, and suddenly appearing — trim rec- 
tangular clearings, walled about by a dense 
swamp growth — in the very midst of the 
woods. When you see one of these bogs — 
even, thrifty, level — you are looking at the 
consummation of an industry which has been 
indissolubly linked with the name of Cape 
Cod since 1677. For it was in that year that 
his loyal subjects in Massachusetts presented 
Charles the Second with a gift of three thou- 
sand codfish, two hogsheads of samp, and 
ten barrels of cranberries! These historic ten 
barrels were filled with the wild cranberry, 
which has always grown freely in certain re- 



80 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

gions of the Cape. Nearly two hundred years 
elapsed before it occurred to any one to ex- 
periment scientifically with the piquant fruit. 
Then Mr. Hall, selecting an old peat swamp 
of practically no value, cleared it of trees and 
bushes and set out cranberry vines, which he 
tended with the solicitous care we associate 
with exotics. His success was immediate, and 
instantly the whole town set to work clearing 
out the numerous swamps and planting wild 
cranberry vines. And then, like some benign 
enchantment, money in the form of scarlet 
berries began to pour out of the ground. Fami- 
lies which had been struggling with poverty 
found themselves independent; widows, of 
whom there are always an unconscionable 
number in any seafaring place, became the 
surprised and grateful recipients of a few hun- 
dred — sometimes a few thousand — dollars 
a year. And more than one old sea captain 
scratched his head in bewilderment when he 
realized that he was getting richer from an old 
swamp where he used to chase foxes than he 
had ever been as master of a vessel. 



INDUSTRIES IN DENNIS 81 

Cape Cod is, without question, the best re- 
gion for cranberries in the whole world. Every 
variety may be grown here more easily and 
better than anywhere else. And as there is no 
substitute for the odd little fruit, it is likely 
that the Cape will always hold the supremacy. 

The culture has now been reduced to an ex- 
act science. A swamp is cleared from its wild 
growth, leveled like a floor, and six inches of 
clear sand are carted over the heavy bog soil; 
or a pond or marsh may be filled up and cov- 
ered with sand in the same way. Trenches are 
cut, a dike is thrown up, and a brook turned 
so as to run through it. It has gates, so that in 
the spring the land may be flooded to kill the 
insects, and in the fall to protect against the 
frosts. Sometimes one sees a row of bird- 
houses beside a cranberry bog, to encourage 
the insect-eaters to take up a permanent 
habitation there. Vines are placed at regu- 
lar intervals, making such a solid mat that 
weeding is hardly necessary, after the third 
year. It costs from two hundred and fifty 
to a thousand dollars to make a cranberry 



82 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

bog, and it takes three years for it to come 
into bearing condition. But, once started, 
the profits are large. In very good years 
the interest on money so invested is one hun- 
dred per cent. In very poor years the crops 
may be a total failure. But an average return 
of thirty per cent is not high : fifty per cent is 
probably nearer accurate. One bog of sixteen 
acres not far from Dennis netted in one year 
eight thousand dollars. Half an acre at Har- 
wichport yielded in one season ninety-eight 
barrels. It is easy to see how the possession of 
a good bog will carry a thrifty Cape-C odder 
through the year. 

But the traveler through this region will 
probably be more struck by the picturesque 
than the economic value of the cranberry bog. 
Now that the Portuguese are coming in such 
numbers — sometimes almost doubling the 
native population during the cranberry sea- 
son — much of the distinctive flavor of the 
festival has been lost. The gayly colored fig- 
ures, kneeling in long lines and picking rapidly 
and patiently all day long, make as decorative 



INDUSTRIES IN DENNIS 83 

a scene for the outsider as ever. But to the 
native the season no longer holds its charac- 
teristic charm. For in the old days it was the 
custom of everybody, storekeeper and house- 
keeper and children, — for whose convenience 
the school season was conveniently regulated, 

— the minister and his wife, a city cousin or 
two, young lovers making plans for the future 

— all to congregate on the bogs. The hay 
wagons were converted into impromptu trans- 
portation carts, and the family with a horse 
stopped at the door of the family without one 

— giving the children and old folks a friendly 
"lift" on the way. And while the young peo- 
ple picked for dear life, resuscitating old gibes 
and jokes that had been put away since last 
cranberry time, their mothers sat under huge 
umbrellas keeping *Hally," and their fathers 
loaded the crates upon the wagons. There was 
even work for the very aged. One could be 
eighty and half blind, but if one had "screened " 
(sorted the good berries from the bad over a 
long screen) for twenty-five years, one could 
still earn a dollar and a quarter a day in the 



84 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

gossipy atmosphere, and at the not too strenu- 
ous labor of the ''screening-house." It was all 
very jolly : there was much amiable competition 
and rivalry, and he who achieved a hundred 
measures — or six hundred quarts — in a day 
earned ten dollars, and made, besides, a rec- 
ord that was not forgotten until it was ex- 
celled. 

That was when all the picking was done by 
hand, and was paid for at the rate of ten cents 
a measure. Now the picking is done by the 
aid of a scoop, and one can get a hundred 
measures much more quickly; but he will 
only get paid six or seven cents a measure — 
so the advantage and disadvantage run quite 
evenly. 

There are still towns on the Cape where the 
noon hour is a picnic and the whole cranberry 
season partakes of the nature of a festival. But 
every year they are fewer. The ever-industri- 
ous Portuguese are good pickers, and honest. 
The natives, however, who came as much for 
the fun as for the money, feel that cranberry- 
ing is no longer a family affair. One cannot 



INDUSTRIES IN DENNIS 85 

picnic with the same freedom with strangers 
as one did with friends. 

But the industry continues, although the 
sociabihty is gone. The cranberry flourishes, 
and will probably continue to do so as long as 
we gather around the Thanksgiving table with 
a turkey imperatively demanding this partic- 
ular condiment. 

One cannot leave Dennis without a mention 
of that other source of income which is even 
more lucrative than the cranberry — the sum- 
mer people. The whole Cape is gradually be- 
coming the recreation portion of New Eng- 
land. The balmy air, the warm salt water, the 
healthfulness and the quaint atmosphere of 
both the landscape and the architecture will 
always be worth a cash return to the city 
dwellers. And where summer people go they 
create a different set of standards — some 
good and some bad. It is stimulating to the 
natives of a seashore place to come in contact 
with people from the outer world. The way 
in which the country homesteads bloomed out 
with flower gardens and window boxes as soon 



86 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

as the summer visitors initiated these touches 
on their own rented or bought or built resi- 
dences is a pretty proof of the value of example. 
Friendships are made, too, and all sorts of 
pleasant ties are established. For the Cape- 
Codder is by no means a dull rustic, but a 
shrewd, intelligent, and frequently delightful 
character — who can give more things than 
butter and eggs to the city folk who come to 
know him. 

But the annual influx has some effects not 
so admirable. And one must admit that the 
stranger within the gates of a Cape village is 
often uncomfortably conscious of being preyed 
upon as well as served by the community. 
More than one proprietor of the "general 
store" has an uncanny similarity to the spider 
in his hole — waiting until his victims appear, 
then sucking them dry, and retiring for eight 
months to digest the gains of his too-closely 
driven bargains. 

But good roads and good hotels, well-built 
houses and progressive shops — these are with- 
out question of great value to any township. 



INDUSTRIES IN DENNIS 87 

And this is what the summer people have 
brought and are bringing, — more and more 
of them every year, — and to such an extent 
that one feels quite justified in calling them at 
present the most profitable source of income to 
the Cape. 



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Chapter VII 

BREWSTER AND CAPE COD 
ARCHITECTURE 

IT is impossible to pass through Brewster ^ 
without being impressed by its air of mod- 
est prosperity, of tidiness, of lack of poverty 
and absence of pretension. Neat, adequate, 
homelike — the small farmhouses repeat the 
same general line and style of architecture, 
and give evidence of a people thrifty, self-re- 
specting, and comfortable. 

The architecture of the Cape differs radi- 
cally from that of Maine, of Connecticut, of 
northern Massachusetts, or of the South, even 

1 Brewster was originally the North Parisli of Harwich. It 
was named for an old Pilgrim pastor who came over in the 
Mayflower. 



BREWSTER 89 

although built at the same time and under 
similar conditions. 

These men came from the south of England 
and in their minds and memories was the sim- 
ple Devon or Cornish cottage which uncon- 
sciously influenced their hands when they fash- 
ioned in wood their home in the new land. 
Their common sense suggested that the house 
should nestle under a hill or behind a sand 
dune, out of the way of the winter winds, 
while their love of the sea usually found a way 
to get a glimpse — from side door or back 
window — of the dark-blue water. And so we 
still find them, all over the Cape: a story and 
a half, shingled, gray, and weather-beaten, 
nestled in a nook, across a meadow, or half 
hidden under trees of a newer growth, or in 
decent lines on either side of the undisturbed 
streets of the town. 

Although individual houses may be slightly 
modified, yet the majority of them adhere to 
one general pattern — as integral a part of the 
Cape landscape as the galleried and pillared 
mansion of Virginia is to that lovely region. 



90 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

This general pattern is a story and a half, ab- 
solutely unadorned : there is no gable to break 
the perfect slope of the roof; no porch or even 
hood to mar the utter simplicity of the door. 
This well-proportioned portal is flush with the 
hntel : it does not project nor is it recessed, and 
rarely has side or fan lights. It is a brave, 
strong door, to shut out the storm and let in 
the stranger. 

It opens into a tiny vestibule, with a fair- 
sized room on either side. One of these rooms 
is the parlor, with a three-ply carpet, a horse- 
hair sofa, a corner cupboard, on which are 
arranged sea shells and strange bits of coral 
which ''grandfather" brought back from some 
round-the-world voyage. A hair wreath, which 
incorporates the black tresses of maturity with 
the blonde curls of infancy and the white locks 
of old age, — laboriously worked into the 
gruesome semblance of flowers, — hangs above 
the excellently built mantel. This room is 
used rarely: the chairs do not suggest com- 
fort; its two windows facing the street and its 
one window facing the side yard are never 



BREWSTER 91 

opened, except once a year at the time of 
spring house-cleaning. 

On the other side of the narrow entry is 
the downstairs bedroom: perhaps it is "grand- 
ma's" room; perhaps it is the guest-room. 
With its dark, chintz-covered wing chair, and 
the httle Hght-stand close to the four-posted, 
cherry bedstead with a patchwork quilt, it is 
a quaint and not uncomfortable room. But 
there is no luxury nor elegance nor superfluity 
here. The Cape-Codders have always been 
a plain and thrifty folk. 

Behind these two rooms, and reached by 
passing through one or the other, is the ''mid- 
dle room" running almost the length of the 
house. It usually has a side door leading di- 
rectly out into the yard, without even the 
pause of a landing, — a meager enough little 
side yard, too, with a picket fence and a few 
perennials in unformed beds. At the opposite 
end is the buttery, its shelves filled with dishes 
and food; and close against the buttery — 
between it and the guest-room — is the little 
"kitchen bedchamber," a place of warmth and 



92 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

refuge in winter and of stifling contraction in 
summer. This *' middle room" is the principal 
room of the house. It serves as dining- and 
sitting-room in summer, and as kitchen and 
dining-room in winter. To its side door the 
neighbors come, seeking to borrow a broom or 
three eggs. Strangers are the only ones who go 
to the lilac-crowded front door. The big cen- 
tral chimney has its widest open fireplace in 
this ''middle room," a crane with hanging 
hooks, where, aforetimes, the family food was 
cooked on Saturday to last a long week. By 
many of them still hang the long-handled 
shovels, the tongs, the bellows, the three-legged 
pots, and queer Dutch ovens — curious relics of 
a housewife's duties long ago. 

Besides the two front rooms and the mid- 
dle room, there is almost invariably an ell or 
lean-to, of one story, where the summer kit- 
chen holds its own, and which is woodshed 
and general utility place in winter. 

The steps — which are as plain as a ship's 
ladder and almost as steep — rise, unadorned 
by baluster or newel post, either directly out 



BREWSTER 93 

of the tiny front vestibule or out of the middle 
room by the fireplace. They lead to the upper 
story where there are usually three bedrooms 
— the two smaller ones possibly unfinished, 
and the large one paneled in white pine. This 
large bedroom was originally used by the old 
sea captain, and it may be fashioned some- 
thing like a ship's cabin with a slightly curved 
ceiling. The narrow doors which open out of 
the bedrooms lead directly on to the precipi- 
tous stairway — and one early learns to put 
out a foot with caution when emerging from 
one's room. 

In each of the old towns and "neighbor- 
hoods" stands a '* great house" or several 
"great houses," two stories and a half, square, 
flat-roofed, or, like their lowlier neighbors, 
pitch-roofed. They are handsome edifices, — 
gray-shingled or clapboarded and painted 
white, — with shutters, a side porch, steps at 
the side door, and with a large story and a half 
ell. But in spite of their added dignity, they 
are still typically Cape houses, and not in the 
least like the old-fashioned mansions in Ports- 



94 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

mouth or in the Berkshires. It was here that 
the selectmen hved, where the mail was de- 
livered once or twice a week, and where the 
peripatetic missionary spent the night. Many 
a quiet caucus was held in the big back kitchen, 
with a mug of hard cider to help the talk along. 
But the majority of these finer houses were 
built by Brewster sea captains — ^for Brewster's 
aristocracy was composed of these shrewd and 
daring men, who made fortunes, many of them 
the beginnings of larger ones, for their de- 
scendants of to-day in Boston, New York, and 
the West, and who built substantial homes and 
planted dignified trees that still shade them. 
In the old Brewster houses were ivory carv- 
ings and Japanese silk hangings, sandalwood 
boxes and alabaster images of the Coliseum 
and the Leaning Tower of Pisa. On each side 
of the grand, unused front doors were mam- 
moth sea shells of curious shape. In the closets, 
on .the ''what-nots," and ranged on the shelves 
of the little cabinets, were boxes of other shells 
picked up on tropic beaches or purchased in 
the bazaars of Calcutta or Mauritius. 



BREWSTER 95 

There is another distinctive feature of Cape 
architecture, now passing fast, — the wind- 
mill, — like a witch with a peaked cap and 
outstretched arms and a slanting broomstick, 
reminding us that the Pilgrims came from 
Holland. Capping half a hundred hills they 
used to dominate the landscape. The farmer 
drove his heavy, creaking wagon up to them 
by a winding path, and haggled for coarse or 
fine grain and the price of it. The hood was 
turned by oxen, slowly, until the sails were ad- 
justed to catch the wind. These inimitably 
quaint relics have outlived their usefulness, 
although in many of them the beams and 
timbers pegged together with wooden pegs are 
still stanch. Not a few have been converted 
into tea-houses, curiosity shops, or a guest- 
house on a summer estate — a pampered old 
age for those crude and sturdy helpers of a 
Puritan age. 

The men who built these houses and these 
mills were a conspicuously fine lot. Many of 
them were engaged in privateering and whal- 
ing: of the thirty-two soldiers whose graves 



96 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

are marked in the old burying-ground, as hav- 
ing served as soldiers in the Revolution, a great 
number of them were sailors. More ship- 
masters engaged in foreign trade went from 
the town of Brewster than from any other 
town or place in the country in proportion to 
its size. From a population numbering about 
a thousand people, we have names of one 
hundred and fifteen shipmasters living there 
since 1840. In 1850, the height of the town's 
prosperity, there were over fifty living there 
at one time. 

Those to whom architectural relics of the 
past are precious must always be interested in 
an event of the War of 1812, which preserved 
the town intact. A demand was made by the 
British commander upon the people of Brew- 
ster for four thousand dollars for immunity 
from invasion and destruction of property. A 
meeting was held, a delegation waited upon 
the British commander, and finally, after a 
vain argument, it was decided best to give 
security for the sum. Measures were taken to 
tax salt-works, buildings of all descriptions. 



BREWSTER 97 

and vessels owned in town or frequenting the 
shore. The day before the term of grace ex- 
pired, the four thousand dollars was paid and 
the safety of the town guaranteed. While the 
inhabitants of Brewster were severely criti- 
cized for their action in this matter, they con- 
tended that as the National Government had 
left them in a defenseless condition, they were 
impelled to do the best they could to avert the 
destruction of the town. 

It is impossible to discuss the architecture 
of the Cape without a word of the Italian 
villas and bungalows and English manors and 
seashore ''cottages" which mark the trail of 
the summer visitors. Occasionally some sum- 
mer resident will have the taste and sentiment 
to remodel an old homestead so carefully that 
it will retain its perfect line and contour in the 
landscape, while accommodating a family who 
demand the modern comforts of living. But 
these renovations are not common. Most of 
the summer colonies are ugly enough: a blot 
upon the landscape and the seascape, forever 
unrelated to the homely soil and the brooding 



98 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

hills, against which the Devon and Cornish 
transcripts fitted so lovingly. 

Besides the homes, the great house, the 
summer colony, and the windmill, there are 
the church and the schoolhouse, both distinc- 
tively of the Cape, neither influenced nor 
marred by the swarm of summer visitors nor 
by the rising tide of Portuguese. 

The "little gray church on the windy hill" 
is usually small, and if it stands on the edge 
of a graveyard it is apt to be picturesque and 
quaint. But if it is unadorned by trees, it is 
cold and uninviting. Methodist or Baptist — 
the horror of Popery — has divorced it from 
the charm of the churches of Old England, and 
even from the best of New England. The Cape 
churches are not as a rule as attractive as the 
Cape houses. 

The schoolhouse, on the other hand, is often 
quite pleasing. It is usually an unpretentious, 
one-story, useful structure, with two front 
doors, although the boys and girls use both or 
either, with flagstaff and well-tramped yard. 
From it pour out groups of merriest children, 



BREWSTER 99 

red and brown and black in indiscriminate 
mirth. It is rather singular that, in spite of the 
conspicuously high educational standard of 
Barnstable County, the school yard is rarely 
well kept. One does not see the window boxes 
and the flower beds that brighten many a 
school yard in western or northern Massa- 
chusetts. 

The last earthly habitation of the native is 
perhaps the most beautiful of all. The grave- 
yard, — selected with care, either for the view 
or for convenience or economy, — while poor 
in lofty monuments or cypress walks or decora- 
tive beds, is usually indescribably charming. 
It is not crowded: the rounded mounds sink 
drowsily into the green grass. Here and there 
are stones which commemorate men lying in 
graves that never have been digged — under 
the lapping waves. Their families placed the 
gray slate slab or table to be a record, then felt 
their duty done and turned to the care of the 
hving. Of course, each graveyard — however 
small — has its soldiers' monument, for the 
Cape gave right royally of her sons in time of 



100 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

war; and in or near the family plot stands the 
shaft to Ephraim, Noel, or Ebenezer, and his 
comrades who fell for their country — and rose 
again. 

To one with imagination and leisure these 
moss-grown stones have a tale to be read. 
Yonder slanting slab has a pathetic pair of 
hands in rude bas-relief, and tells us that here 
lies Mary Jane, aged forty, the third wife of 
Reuben — and all else is obliterated by the 
finger of time! 

The Cape-Codders have builded well: their 
homes and public buildings follow lines of 
dignity and comfort; the windmill strikes a 
piquant note upon the hill. And when one 
stands upon their final resting-place, — often 
by the slope of a willow-fringed pool, slumber- 
ing, too, amid the late afternoon shadows or in 
sight of the unforgettable beach with its silver 
expanse glittering for a mile and a half at low 
tide, — one feels that their selection of a last 
habitation was the best of all. 




Chapter VIII 



ORLEANS 

THE early settlers loved to give the names 
of their home villages in Devon, Kent, 
and Cornwall to the villages which they hewed 
out in the New World, and thus we have the 
familiar English titles dotting every corner 
and crevice of the Cape. But Orleans, al- 
though originally part of Nauset, or Eastham, 
being the terminus of the French Atlantic 
Cable from Brest, caught a lasting reminder of 
its Gallic affiliations in the name it took at its 
incorporation in 1797, and remains the unique 
example of a foreign title among the Cape Cod 
towns. 



102 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

To the passing automobilist Orleans may 
seem rather less interesting than some of its 
neighbors, but that is because he is looking at 
mere topography. A glance at the vital his- 
tory of this town reveals incidents, imagina- 
tion, and quite an amazing amount of spirit 
of a lively sort. It was Orleans which, when 
an offer of indemnity from destruction for 
consideration of a tribute was made by the 
English fleet, as had been done at Brewster,^ 
immediately and indignantly rejected it and 
successfully repelled all efforts of the enemy 
to land. They displayed the same pluck when 
a British barge entered Orleans Harbor and 
took possession of the schooner Betsy and the 
sloops Camel, Washington, and Nancy. Two 
of the sloops being aground w^ere set on fire 
by the enemy, and the fire was promptly and 
triumphantly extinguished by the inhabi- 
tants. The British got the Betsy under way, 
but the midshipman, being unacquainted with 
the coast, put the only American on board in 
charge of the vessel upon his promise to carry 

1 See p. 96. 



ORLEANS 103 

it to Provincetown. But the canny Yankee 
ran it into Yarmouth, where it was recaptured 
by the natives and the crew made prisoners 
and sent to Salem, where they met the course 
of justice reserved for them. There was even 
a pitched battle in these very streets of Or- 
leans, which are so placidly traversed to-day, 
resulting in the death of several of the enemy 
— a fray which has ever since been dignified 
by the name of "The Battle of Orleans." 

The town had plenty of initiative in regard 
to civil enterprise as well. In 1804 a canal 
from Town Cove to Boat Meadow River, nearly 
on a boundary line between Orleans and East- 
ham, was dug by a company empowered by the 
two towns. The Legislature was petitioned for 
authority to create a lottery in aid of the pro- 
ject, which suggests that perhaps the French 
idea had gone a little deeper than merely the 
name in this town. However, the strict old 
Puritan Government granted no such frivolous 
concessions, and either for that or for other 
reasons the canal was never completed. 

There is a lively legend about this canal. 



104 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

When Captain Southack sailed out to cap- 
ture the pirate Bellamy (whose story is given 
in more detail on page 173), the sea, lashed by 
the storm, forced a passage through the Cape 
along the very line chosen later for the Orleans 
Canal, and the captain sailed with a whale- 
boat through from the Bay to the Atlantic 
Ocean. Those who would cast a doubt on the 
authenticity of this trip need only confer with 
any native of Orleans, man or child. For every 
one knows that when a storm is brewing a 
mirage is plainly visible in the sky. Then it 
is that we can see again Captain Southack's 
whaling-boat sailing once again across the 
meadows of Orleans, — following the old route 
which legend grants him, from the Bay to the 
Atlantic Ocean, — and disappearing in pursuit 
of the pirate ship! 

However, neither dazzled nor discouraged 
by the strange fate of her first canal, Orleans 
tried a similar enterprise again in 1818. Being 
largely engaged in the manufacture of salt, 
the town united with Chatham in the construc- 
tion of a canal through the beach, below Strong 



ORLEANS 105 

Island, for the benefit of the salt meadows. 
The canal was cut, but the sand choked it and 
made the enterprise a failure. But though un- 
fortunate with its canals, Orleans was a flour- 
ishing town, having in 1855 four whaling ves- 
sels of one hundred and fifty-five tons each, 
employing a hundred and twenty -five men and 
securing oil worth $19,250. To-day one of its 
most valuable industries is also connected with 
the water, but in a more highly intensive fash- 
ion. The Mayo Duck Farm at Orleans, which 
hatches about fifty thousand ducklings in a 
season and gives employment to a score of men, 
is justly famous. 

But the duck business which l)rings most 
pleasure, if not most profit, in this region is of 
quite another stripe. Duck shooting is one of 
the favorite Cape sports, and late into the sea- 
son one hears the shots of the gunners and 
meets them in the w^oods, brown and smiling, 
their booty slung across their shoulders. If you 
can afford it, you own your own gunning-stand. 
either by a pond or by the ocean. If you can- 
not own, you may hire. These stands are 



106 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

merely low shanties, covered with a thatch 
that makes them practically invisible. The 
French and English soldiers could teach no 
camouflage of this sort to a genuine Cape Cod 
duck hunter. Before the shanties are teth- 
ered live decoy ducks. A drake is also tethered 
a short distance in front, so as to keep the 
ducks alert. One man in the shanty keeps 
watch: when he sees a flock of ducks in the 
distance he immediately sends out two or three 
live decoys, who fly out in front of the stand, 
quacking loudly. The wild ducks hear the 
sound, and swing in close to the beach. The 
live decoy ducks immediately come back to 
their place as they have been taught to do, and 
the gunners line up behind their barrier. At a 
signal given by one of them, they rise up, and 
all shoot at once — often killing a whole flock 
of as many as fifteen or twenty at once. 

The same method is followed in gunning for 
whistlers, coot, geese, and sheldrake. It is 
difficult for any one who is not under the fas- 
cination of the game to see anything but gross 
slaughter in this kind of shooting, and the law 



ORLEANS 107 

which limits fifteen ducks to a man seems very 
necessary. The law which prohibits the shoot- 
ing of any ducks before sunrise or after sun- 
down has helped save many of the wild fowl 
along these shores, as their habit is to come 
close to the shallow places along the shore to 
find food. 

An experienced gunner will sometimes pre- 
fer a more difficult and more sportsmanlike 
method of getting his birds. After building 
up a temporary blind of seaweed, and setting 
out a few wooden decoys, — possibly keeping 
a duck and a drake in the pen with him, — 
he will await the coming of the wild birds and 
shoot them on the wing, getting less game, but 
more excitement. 

Few of the twentieth-century folk who fly 
through Orleans by train or in an automobile 
realize how comparatively short is time w^hen 
there was not only no railroad, but hardly 
even a road of any kind in this region. Of 
course, the first roads here, as everywhere in 
the colonies, were Indian trails, which were 
gradually widened. Horses were used, but not 



108 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

carriages. The same state of affairs which still 
exists in primitive parts of the South and West, 
where a wheel rut is practically unknown, — 
all carting and carrying being by mule-pack, 
— was the universal condition. Carriages first 
made their appearance in the cities. How 
many people realize that it was not until 1687 
that the first horse coaches appeared in Bos- 
ton; that there were no carriages in Connecti- 
cut until 1756; that in 1768 there were only 
twenty-two privately owned wheeled vehicles 
in Boston; only 145 in 1798. And that there 
were only a dozen or so private coaches in the 
combined cities of Boston, New York, and 
Philadelphia before 1700.^ This was due to the 
poor roads and lack of bridges. Obviously 
pleasure driving, or even driving for business, 
labored under a sobering handicap when a 
coach, coming to a stream too deep to be 
forded, was stood up in two parallel canoes and 
thus conveyed across while the horses swam! 
Naturally, with this state of affairs as to 
roads, the waterways were very popular, es- 
pecially in country districts. They were con- 



ORLEANS 109 

tinually used: in summer by boat, and in 
winter by sleds and carrioles which were drawn 
over the frozen surface by horses and dogs. 
Later came ox-carts — picturesque vehicles 
which most people do not associate with New 
England scenes. 

Down on the Cape, even when roads were 
widened and improved and bridges were built, 
the easiest way of communication continued 
to be by water instead of by land. For months 
at a time the roads were rivers of mud or drifts 
of snow, and it w^as no uncommon thing for a 
wagon to become so embedded in a muddy rut 
that the driver would leave it where it stuck 
and wait for spring, when he would return and 
dig it out. When the corduroy roads were 
built, they soon became so rough that wagons 
w^ere literally shaken to pieces in traveling on 
them. It is quite understandable that a man 
might prefer to get caught in the mud, from 
whence he had a reasonable hope of ultimately 
extracting his wagon, than to see it knocked 
into uncollectible fragments by the jolting of 
the corduroy road. 



110 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

Of course this state of affairs was soonest 
mended in the cities and latest in the country 
districts, and on the Cape, even after roads 
became very fair, water travel was preferred 
to that by land. This was how the sailing- 
packet lines came to be so firmly established. 
From almost every village on the inside shore 
of the Cape, one or more of these lines was 
maintained, and passengers and merchandise 
were conveyed by them once or twice a week 
to and from Boston. The usual custom was to 
notify the South Shore dwellers of the arrival 
and departure of these vessels by very simple 
means — namely, of signals hoisted on some 
eminence, discernible to these villages! These 
packets were roomy and sociable, and seem 
the legitimate background for the tales that 
come down to us of jolly trips and frequent 
trials of skill and speed between rival lines, 
sometimes accompanied by modest betting on 
the part of the champions of different vessels. 
Now Provincetown is the only Cape town 
which communicates regularly by steamer with 
Boston. The old stage-coach was almost as 



ORLEANS 111 

romantic a feature as the packet, although 
it grew in favor more slowly. The transition 
between private and public conveyance was 
very gradual. First a horse w^as borrowed, and 
then a chaise. Then both horse and chaise. 
Then, to meet a growing demand, a horse and 
chaise were kept to be let. Finally a driver 
was added, and the age of the stage-coach 
commenced. 

At this time it was an all-day journey from 
Boston to the Cape; a trip wearisome and in- 
convenient according to modern standards, 
but not without its charm when viewed in the 
light of retrospect. Those early days recall the 
stories of Balzac and De Maupassant, in which 
the stage-coach furnishes scene and actors for 
tragedy and comedy, A traveler had to start 
at early dawn and take his place in the coach 
in intimate proximity with all sorts and con- 
ditions of fellow-passengers. The numerous 
stopping-places along the route gave ample 
opportunity for the exchange of new opinions 
and good cheer at the various taverns. They 
had no hotels or inns then: Cornish's at 



112 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

South Plymouth, Swift's at West Sandwich, 
Fessenden's at Sandwich, Rowland's at West 
Barnstable, marked the route. The roads were 
rough, the springs not of the finest, and if all 
hands had to turn out now and then to help 
hoist the wagon out of a sandpit or quagmire 
— well, it was all part of the trip. A journey 
to Boston was the event of the year, sometimes 
of a lifetime. When the coaches began to run 
more and more frequently, and finally brought 
mail from Boston every day instead of an 
irregular once or twice a week, people felt that 
the millennium had come. But as the packet 
was forced to the wall by the steamboat, so in 
due time the stage-coach, outsped by the 
steam-engine, rumbled forever out of sight. 

In 1847 the railroad, under the name of the 
Cape Cod Branch Railroad (which was part 
of the Old Colony), began to poke its nose 
down on the Cape — first as far as Sandwich, 
and then, ten years later, on to Barnstable 
and Yarmouth. The name was changed to the 
Cape Cod Railroad in 1854 and the same year 
the road was extended to Hyannis. Twelve 



ORLEANS 113 

years later a sale of the Cape Cod Central to 
the Cape Cod Railroad was made, and the line 
pushed from Yarmouth to Orleans. Then from 
Wellfleet to Provincetown, while branches 
were added from Buzzard's Bay to Wood's 
Hole and from Harwich to Chatham. It was 
a slow development, however, and the first 
trains that arrived at the newly constructed 
railroad stations in the various villages pulled 
cars hardly larger than the stage-coaches 
which they were destined to banish. There 
are plenty of people alive to-day up and down 
the Cape who can tell you of the first train that 
arrived in their village, and the sensation it 
produced. They were primitive enough — 
these conveyances. It was not until 1889 that 
steam was used to heat the cars, and their 
journey through the scrub oak and blueberry 
patches and backyards, and their advent in 
and departure from the small stations, had the 
pleasant intimacy bred of small ness and a cer- 
tain picturesqueness which we no longer as- 
sociate with steam coaches. 

One of the most revolutionary effects of the 



114 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

railroad was felt in the postal service. Origi- 
nally the pockets of chance travelers were the 
only channels of transporting letters. When 
the stage-coach came in, mails were brought 
more frequently, with a great clatter and hul- 
labaloo and snapping of whips as in old Eng- 
lish days. But even then many of the villages 
were only visited occasionally. In 1794 there 
was no post-office below Yarmouth, and the 
mail for the lower Cape was sent and received 
once a week. When John Thatcher contracted 
to carry it for a dollar a day, and was appointed 
to do so, the thrifty folk of Yarmouth, though 
doubtless glad to receive their letters regularly, 
nevertheless insisted upon styling the inno- 
vation a tremendous extravagance of the ad- 
ministration. 

But soon after the opening of the railroad 
mail was sent and received twice a day in quite 
a matter-of-fact fashion. Later two telegraph 
lines were constructed on the Cape, and the 
first telephone was installed. Thus the Cape 
was caught in a net of steel and iron progress, 
never to be released, and the days of John 



ORLEANS 115 

Thatcher seemed as ancient history as were 
those of Greece. Now the speeding trains wave 
perpetual banners of smoke from Boston to 
the innermost points of the Cape, and auto- 
mobiles glint and flash over the flawless high- 
ways in such numbers that traffic policemen 
— many of them bronzed old sea captains — 
are stationed at the road corners and at 
bridges. There is only one Cape Cod town 
without its railroad station to-day, and that 
is Mashpee,^ and the telegraph and telephone 
wires lace hilltop to hilltop across all Barn- 
stable County.^ 

^ See chap. xvii. 

2 There are many " Telegraph Hills " throughout the 
length of the Cape, dating from the time of the Revolution 
and the War of 1812, when wigwag signals were given from 
one hilltop to another. Beginning with the extreme end of the 
Cape, these hills occur quite frequently (many of them still 
keeping their old names), the last one being Blue Hill, Milton. 




Chapter IX 

EASTHAM AND THE AGRICULTURAL 
FUTURE OF THE CAPE 

IT was once the granary of the Cape — this 
barren, windswept region, with the dying 
sunHght slanting across its rolhng fields. Long, 
low marshes, level and softly tinted, like deli- 
cate pastels, contribute now to the sad and 
lovely scene — quite different in its wistful 
charm from the other towns about it. Its soli- 
tary roads, leading off from the state highway 
to remote houses, are wanly mysterious. Its 
desolation is not unattractive. But its beauty 
— for it has an unmistakable beauty of an 
unearthly quality — is such as to appeal to the 
eye of the artist rather than to that of the 
farmer. 



EASTHAM 117 

*' My Love lies in the gates of foam, 
The last dear wreck of shore: 
The naked sea-marsh binds her home, 
The sand her chamber door." 

It seems almost impossible to believe that 
this town, these gently rolling pastures, so bare 
to-day of anything except the thinnest hay, 
were once luxuriant with rich and waving 
crops, and that the Indians had so many maize 
fields here, and that the early settlers were so 
successful in their magnificent gardens that 
'the Plymouth Colony talked, at one time, of 
removing to Eastham. For this was the very 
region which was at one time the granary of 
Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth. 

What happened, and why? The lesson of 
Eastham is the lesson of all Cape Cod, and, in 
a small degree, a warning for all the United 
States. The fertile soil was forced to bring 
forth crop after crop: all the good w^as ex- 
tracted and none returned, and in course of 
time it became utterly exliausted. To-day it 
lies, like a beautiful and weary woman whose 
life force has ebbed away almost to the last 



118 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

breath. Cape Cod is usually considered — by 
the casual outside world — as a mere sandpit 
on which nothing grows but a few huckleberry 
bushes. The Cape Cod farmers, too, after 
they had raised heavy crops year after year 
without making the smallest return to the 
soil, finding that the meadows which used to 
grow hay twelve feet high now produced a 
scanty three-foot specimen, began to revile 
the '' sand " and to move away in high dudgeon. 
The trouble with Cape Cod, from an agri- 
cultural standpoint, is far less the infertility of 
the soil than the ignorance or laziness of the 
farmer. Every region has its soil peculiari- 
ties, but the wise farmer is the one who ex- 
ploits these peculiarities to the limit, rather 
than he who flees in the face of the difficulties 
they present. Clever as the Cape-Codder was 
in fishing a fat living from the sea, it is only 
recently that it has occurred to him that he 
had an equal opportunity on land, although, 
to be sure, sheep -raising reached quite a height 
about 1820. Now there are signs that he is 
bestirring himself and learning something 



EASTHAM 119 

about modern farming, and that the younger 
generation, instead of flocking off to Fall River 
and New Bedford, as Sicilian folk flock to 
America, are attending agricultural colleges, 
taking special correspondence courses, or 
starting in with some practical line of fruit- 
growing or poultry-raising. 

Here at Eastham, for instance, they have 
discovered that the soil, when dressed with 
seaweed and shells, — an inexpensive and 
accessible fertilizer, — grows asparagus ex- 
traordinarily well, and recently this town alone 
sold forty thousand dollars' worth in one sea- 
son. Farms of from five to fifteen acres are 
being pressed into service, and although there 
is a possibility that the same lack of crop rota- 
tion which was so disastrous in Eastham's early 
days may again work its invidious mischief, 
as yet the asparagus crop is abundant and of 
a high order of excellence. Turnips, too, are 
raised in large quantities, and the strawberry 
flourishes like the green bay tree. It is, how- 
ever, at Falmouth that this latter industry 
has reached its highest point, two thousand 



no CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

dollars' worth being shipped from Falmouth 
alone in the year 1916. Indeed, the strawberry 
market has been glutted several seasons lately, 
and the Portuguese, who are indefatigable 
workers if not scientific ones, have fared ill with 
their returns. 

As a matter of fact, the Cape — the wind- 
swept, sandy Cape — has some decided ad- 
vantages which can, if realized, give it a very 
respectable place in the agricultural world. 
Such institutions as the Cape Cod Farm Bur- 
eau ^ are trying to prove to the native popu- 
lation, and to outsiders seeking a new and 
permanent home, that the Cape is not all sand 
by any means ; that it varies from a heavy clay 
to pure sand, with a sandy loam predominat- 
ing, which is especially suited for the growing 
of small fruits, asparagus, and vegetables. 
There need be no difficulty from lack of mois- 
ture if cultivation is faithfully practiced. The 
long growing season, with the comparatively 
mild open winter, offers an exceptional op- 
portunity to the poultry-raiser as well as to 
^ See chap. in. 



EASTHAM 121 

the general farmer and fruit-grower. The 
steady increase of summer visitors ^ offers a 
splendid outlet for first-quality produce, while 
the excellent state roads and frequent and 
swift train service to Boston - reduce the prob- 
lem of distribution to the minimum. It is true 
that Cape Cod does not feed herself in any 
month of the year; that potatoes, apples, eggs, 
meat, and vegetables are shipped down from 
Boston constantl}^; that hundreds of farmers' 
households still patronize the condensed-milk 
can in lieu of a cow. But it is also true that 
Cape Cod is improving; that although there 
is still lack of tools, lack of knowledge, lack of 
cooperation, lack of capital, nevertheless, 
small fruits are being grown profitably at 
Truro; good hay — a rarity on the Cape — is 
being raised at East Barnstable; the Portu- 
guese have, in some districts, banded them- 
selves together into selling organizations; more 
than one farmer clears a thousand dollars a 
year on the side issue of hens and chickens, and 
asparagus and strawberries have become regu- 

^ See chap. vi. ^ See chap. viii. 



122 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

lar industries of no inconsiderable proportions. 
Fancy farming is becoming popular, too, as is 
shown by the Bay End Farm at the head of the 
Bay, where four tractor engines have been at 
work clearing the woodland, and where the 
friendly mistress frequently and freely opens 
her grounds for fetes and holiday celebration. 
At Hatchville a new stock farm along generous 
lines is gathering impetus, and serving as a 
stimulating example to all the countryside. 
Thus the signs point to more progressive days 
on the Cape along lines which have not been 
considered — until recently — as especially 
suited to this region. Perhaps there is poetical 
justice in Eastham — which was originally so 
fertile and then so despoiled — again coming 
to the fore through the prominence of her 
asparagus culture. 

Besides serving as a warning and a hopeful 
example, Eastham has had her own private 
history, which, when read in the light of these 
stirring later days, seems rather pathetic: she 
has come out at the small end of the horn so 
many times. The famous Camp-Meeting 



EASTHAM ns 

Grounds were originally here, and a matter of 
pride, but they were soon removed to Falmouth 
so as to be more accessible. The terminus of 
the French Atlantic Cable was also originally 
placed at North Eastham in 1879, amid a very 
gratifying provincial stir, but was afterwards 
picked up and removed to Orleans. And finally 
much of the land which belonged to Eastham 
was ignominiously chopped off and handed 
over to this same sister town — humiliations 
which Eastham has endured very patiently. 

Eastham, which was first called Nauset, was 
settled in 1646, only seven years after the three 
pioneer towns of Sandwich, Barnstable, and 
Yarmouth, and like these towns she had her 
ups and downs, doing very creditably with her 
fishing, until all maritime activities were rudely 
cut off by the Revolution. After the w^ar whal- 
ing was again restored and a tide of prosperity 
set in. Salt-works were established, and in due 
time the town was able to afford the luxury of a 
pulpit cushion and a singing-school. The same 
spirit of fair play, which in 1670 prompted 
Cape Cod to establish the first public schools 



124 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

in this country and to maintain them with the 
fisheries tax, was evident in Eastham, which, 
a few years previously, had made a provision 
that part of every whale cast on the shore 
should be appropriated for the use of the minis- 
ter. It was not a bad idea, and perhaps the 
same policy, if followed to-day, might tend to 
mitigate some of the unworthy disputes con- 
cerning our financial treatment of the clergy. 
It is, however, less from her historical than 
her topographical aspect that Eastham main- 
tains her unique place in the interest of the ail- 
too casual passer-by. There is continual 
change, perpetual fluctuation along her coast- 
line, where the forest-bearing bluffs may be 
often seen, eaten away, with their trees lying 
along the beach, uptorn roots exposed to the 
air; and where, on the other hand, a storm will 
sometimes make a beach by throwing up 
thousands of tons of sand on a low stretch of 
coast and burying the marsh-bank completely 
out of sight. Large stumps are frequently dis- 
covered a mile out from the land, and ancient 
peat meadows lie under the water in more than 



EASTHAM 



125 



one place. There is even one peat meadow in 
the town which has experienced the changes of 
being buried by the sand, then being w^ashed 
out again by the waves, and finally being re- 
stored to its original state and having fuel 
taken from it. 

It is probably this aspect of Eastham, so 
different from some of the other more stable 
communities of Barnstable County, with its 
pastel tints, and long, low marshes, with its 
inlets and bays in which seaweeds, delicate 
and many colored, float, making pictures 
hardly less frail and transient than those pic- 
tures of another age and time which the his- 
torian tries to grasp — it is probably this 
aspect of Eastham, pensive and beautiful, 
w^iich the stranger will longest remember. 




■•■•r^,"Sv5l 




Chapter X 



WELLFLEET AND CAPE FISHING 

THE popular food of any country offers a 
significant index to that country's tem- 
perament. Can we think of Germany without 
beer, or England without roast beef, or France 
without salads, or Cape Cod without fish? The 
term of "Codfish Aristocracy" — ^ although it 
originated with the Dutch in 1347, the rival 
parties being called hooks and codfish — is 
excellently applicable here. It has frequently 
been aflfirmed that a Briton would starve on the 
fish which sustains a good Cape-Codder. Cer- 
tain it is that, while in Roman Catholic coun- 
tries the fish supply is sometimes exhausted 



WELLFLEET AND CAPE FISHING 127 

by the end of Lent, this is a state of affairs 
never duphcated in Barnstable County. The 
fish dinner is a weekly rite throughout the year, 
and has been ever since the time when Bradford 
received a Jesuit priest at his table and offered 
him fish because it happened to be Friday — 
a courtesy that one might not have been led to 
expect from that uncompromising old Puritan. 
But in spite of the reputation of the Cape 
there are plenty of villages in it where you can- 
not find a clam chowder or buy a fresh mack- 
erel. Whatever sea food is caught is sent 
direct to Boston : the natives are so busy play- 
ing skipper or chauffeur or gardener to the 
summer folk that they have no time for humbler 
occupations. But at Wellfleet you are pretty 
sure to fare well in regard to ocean products. 
Whether you wish to delve back into history 
and see how this town ranked among the 
other fishing towns, or whether you wish to 
taste the delicacy of a quahaug pie; or whether 
you merely want to take a rod and reel and go 
fishing yourself — your desires can be easily 
and happily met. 



128 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

The fishing industry of the Cape was the 
first of all its industries. As early as 1659 we 
find the Commissioners of the Colonies recom- 
mending to the General Court that they *' regu- 
late the taking of mackerel, since fish was the 
most staple commodity of the county." Fisher- 
ies for both cod and mackerel were of the first 
importance, and even at that early date it was 
considered advisable to tax strangers who came 
to the Cape to fish. 

Wellfleet had her hundred vessels at the 
Banks in those days, and led so triumphantly 
in the whaling era that her name was originally 
"Whalefleet." Her whaling schooners were 
built in her own yards from her own timber. 
This whaling business was entirely different 
from Bank fishing. At first only the whales 
that happened to pass near shore were caught. 
Station houses were erected to watch for them. 
When they were sighted, vessels, always kept 
in readiness, dashed out after them. But by 
and by the whales grew wary. They avoided 
the shore and the whole Cape region. And then 
whaling parties, with provisions and harpoons 



WELLFLEET AND CAPE FISHING 129 

and various implements of destruction suffi- 
cient to last for months, went after them. 
These parties pursued their game out to the 
Falkland Islands; to Guinea and Brazil, and 
Africa and Hudson Bay. Jesse Holbrook, of 
Wellfleet, killed in Revolutionary times fifty- 
two sperm whales in one voyage, which exploit 
won for him such fame that he was afterward 
engaged by a London firm for twelve years to 
teach their employees this curious art. After 
a checkered career he returned to Wellfleet in 
1795 — perhaps one of the most unique vete- 
rans of any warfare mentioned in the annals of 
Cape Cod warfare. Those to whom the word 
"whaling" brings up only a vague picture, may 
form some idea of its value by this. In 1843 a 
whale was captured near the end of the Cape 
by Captain Ebenezer Cook, and estimated to 
contain two hundred barrels of oil and two 
thousand pounds of bone. Not having proper 
facilities for handling this mammoth find, only 
one hundred and twenty-five barrels of oil 
were saved and three hundred pounds of bone. 
Even with this waste the whale was worth 



130 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

ten thousand dollars — and this in the days 
when ten thousand dollars was a fortune. Cot- 
ton Mather, writing on this subject in 1697, 
describes a cow and calf recently caught in this 
vicinity: "The cow was fifty-five feet long; the 
bone was nine or ten inches wide; a cart upon 
wheels might have gone into the mouth of it. 
The calf was twenty feet long, for unto such 
vast calves the sea-monsters draw forth their 
breasts. But so does the good God give the 
people to suck the sea." 

There were regular whaleboat fleets, and 
during King William's War, which raged al- 
most uninterruptedly from 1699 to 1703, when- 
ever expeditions were sent out against the 
enemy, whaleboat fleets always accompanied 
them. These craft were necessarily small, be- 
cause the enemy's ports were usually located 
near the heads of rivers beyond the tidewaters, 
where ordinary transports could not reach 
them. They were manned by whalemen, sail- 
ors, and friendly Indians. Upon the wale of 
each boat strong pieces of leather were fast- 
ened, so that whenever they grounded the men 



WELLFLEET AND CAPE FISHING 131 

could step overboard, slip long bars through 
the leather buoys and take up the boats, and 
carry them to deeper waters. At night or in 
stormy weather, the boats were taken on shore, 
turned over, and used instead of shelter tents. 
Each boat was fitted with a brass kettle and 
other conveniences for cooking. 

But the turn of the wheel which brought 
wealth to Pennsylvania took it away from 
Massachusetts. There is a story that some old 
sailors who had heard of the discovery of an 
oil well in Pennsylvania went off, determined 
to bring back enough whale oil to knock the 
new-fangled product out of business. They 
hunted whales right vigorously, and came back 
at the end of three years with a heavy cargo 
of treasure. But by that time the mysterious 
petroleum was gushing up everywhere and the 
whale oil was practically unmarketable. 

They also tell the story of another crew who 
departed for whale oil and were gone two years. 
On their return they were greeted with the 
eager inquiry: ''Well, how many whales did 
you get?'' "We didn't see a single whale," 



132 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

was the cheerful response, ''but we had a 
damned fine sail." 

It is impossible to stem the tide of progress. 
With the opening of the oil wells, the whahng 
business received its death-blow. The Rev- 
olutionary War, the invention of iron steam- 
ships, and the development of the railroad ^ 
diverted capital. It is interesting to note here 
that the Great War has brought a sudden 
impetus back to this ancient industry. In cer- 
tain bearings of the engines on the modern 
battleship it has been found that ''case oil" 
— a lubricant which does not disintegrate 
under great heat or pressure — is absolutely 
necessary. This case oil is found in the head 
of the sperm whale and is found here only. To 
procure it whaling vessels have again been 
fitted up, mariners procured, and in the sum- 
mer of 1917 the brig Viola returned to New 
Bedford with twelve hundred and fifty bar- 
rels of sperm oil and a hundred and twenty-one 
pounds of ambergris, valued at about seventy- 
five thousand dollars. However, even this re- 

1 See chap. viii. 



WELLFLEET AND CAPE FISHING 133 

vival is hardly enough to affect the Cape as a 
whole. It must be admitted that the maritime 
interests of Barnstable County have gone to 
pieces, and from ports like Wellfleet, out of 
which a hundred vessels once sailed, now only 
glance the white wings of pleasure catboats 
or the occasional sparkle of oars in an old 
dory. And this, from the town which, early in 
the Revolution, petitioned for an abatement of 
her war tax, stating that her whale fishery, by 
which nine tenths of her people lived, was 
entirely cut off by British gunboats, and that 
the shellfish industries, on which the remain- 
ing tenth depended, were equally at a stand- 
still. In this distress, as later in the Civil War, 
the sailors took to privateering and made a 
memorable record. 

The days have passed when such a fare of 
codfish could be got as the one brought in by 
William McKay in 1882, consisting of 4062 
quintals, worth twenty-two thousand dollars. 
The great blackfish chase of 1884 w^hen fifteen 
hundred were driven down from Provincetow^n 
to Dennis, where they were caught, and brought 



134 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

in between twelve and fifteen thousand dol- 
lars, is also past and will never be repeated. 

But in spite of changed conditions, Well- 
fleet still boasts a goodly fishing industry. Her 
shellfish are excellent and abundant. Oysters 
are shipped in large quantities to Boston; 
clams and quahaugs, scallops and mussels, 
lobsters and crabs are all caught and cooked 
in half a hundred delectable ways. The French 
mussel is found here, although it is not popu- 
larly appreciated as yet. There are several 
ponds at Wellfleet which vie with the Bay in 
yielding up delicacies: pickerel, white and red 
perch, black bass and landlocked salmon and 
blue fish. The summer people, of whom there 
are many, can tell one where to go in search of 
such sport. 

The cold-storage plants for fish, which are 
seen in many places on the Cape, show that the 
industry is by no means extinct. These are 
usually owned by stock companies, and often 
the stock is owned by the fishermen. 

Cape Cod has been called the dividing line 
between the tropical seas and the North At- 



WELLFLEET AND CAPE FISHING 135 

lantic seas. Here the Gulf Stream strikes and 
then flows toward the European coasts. Above 
this Hne marine vegetation is of Arctic flora, 
distinct in many features from that of Long 
Island. In fact, the difference in the flora of 
Massachusetts Bay and that of Buzzard's Bay 
is greater than that of Massachusetts Bay and 
the Bay of Fundy, or of Nantucket and Nor- 
folk. 

Thus, in spite of the fact that Cape Cod has 
lost much of its prestige as a commercial fish- 
ing center, it still gives a good deal of pleasure 
and gets a great deal of profit from its ocean, 
ponds, and streams; and those who crave the 
flavor of clam fritters and oysters on the half- 
shell cannot do better than to seek for them in 
Wellfleet. 

There are interesting things above the earth 
as well as in the w aters under the earth in this 
town. The four red crosses of a wireless sta- 
tion, latticed against the sky here, are visible 
for miles around and are quite as thrilling, in 
their way, to the sociologist, as the tall, ruined 
arches of the Roman aqueduct that march 



136 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

across the sky, mementos of another great 
civiUzation. 

This station, which is owned by the Marconi 
Company, was estabhshed in 1903, and sends 
out press and long-distance messages every 
night, its range being sixteen hundred miles. 
Although there are several other wireless sta- 
tions scattered along the coast of Cape Cod, 
this was the first high-powered equipment 
installed in this country, and has transmit- 
ted signals to England which were received 
by Mr. Marconi — rather impressive facts 
to be associated with the humble fishing 
hamlet. 

Alongside this evidence of modernity there 
are legends in Wellfleet. Those who have lived 
here long will tell you, with hushed breath, of 
the minister's deformed child who was cruelly 
murdered by his father's own hand. On moon- 
lit nights the pathetic, misshaped little ghost 
still flits around the rosebush where the child 
loved to play. And if you are searching for 
ghosts, be sure to go down to the beach where 
Sam Bellamy's pirate ship was cast away. 



WELLFLEET AND CAPE FISHING 137 

There the old buccaneer still prowls about, 
stooping now and then to pick up the coins 
flung him by the skeleton hands of his drowned 
shipmates. 

Wellfleet had its commercial enterprises, 
too, as had so many of the Cape towns in those 
early days. In 1815 the Wellfleet Manufactur- 
ing Company was incorporated with a capital 
of six thousand dollars for the purpose of man- 
ufacturing cotton and woolen yarns. This was 
the same year that a great gale swept over the 
country near Buzzard's Bay. With it came 
the highest tide ever known, exceeding even the 
memorable one of 1635. Trees were uprooted, 
salt-works destroyed, and vessels driven from 
their moorings and landed on shore. Had the 
tide risen higher it would have inundated the 
entire Cape. 

Thus the history of the little town rounds 
itself out, as does the history of many of 
its neighbors. Commerce, success, disaster, 
change, progress, and fluctuation; and then a 
final settling into a catering to the summer 
people. The four tall towers of the wireless. 



138 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

marching across the sky, are the last touch 
of the twentieth century upon the face of the 
little town first settled as a fishing hamlet a 
hundred and fifty-four years ago. 





>^^^^!.1#:4^ -^^V 



Chapter XI 



TRURO 

THERE is, perhaps, no town where the 
pecuhar formation of the Cape can be 
more clearly seen than at Truro. Here, among 
the rolling dunes, with houses tucked into the 
hollows at their base, out of reach of the winds, 
and with the winding roads recalling the old 
days when every wagon had an extra width of 
tire and axle so as to get through the heavy 
sand, one can most easily trace the history of 
this curious topography. 

These hills, many of them so green that only 
the initiated realize that they are in reality 
sand dunes, with opening vistas through which 
one may catch a glimpse of the sea; with paths 
leading between them to the solitary and dis- 



140 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

tant houses of which we may see only a bit of 
the roof; with their httle gardens lying like 
bracelets around their bases; with their stunted 
trees, and low levels of red and brown, wind- 
licked marshes with their inlets and creeks; 
and with their churches placed high on an oc- 
casional crest, like the little rocky chapels on 
the Cornish coast of England — this is Truro ! 
This half-desolate and wholly fascinating 
landscape is not infrequently described as 
typical of the whole Cape. It is not. Down 
through Falmouth and Sandwich and Bourne 
there are fertile farms and heavy forests : more 
of both than there were seventy-five years ago. 
The increase in forest land on the Cape comes 
about in this way: When a tract of land that 
has been tilled is abandoned, — the farmer hav- 
ing died and his sons having gone to the city, 
— it becomes covered by grass by the end of 
a year or two. The year after, miniature pitch 
pines have sprung up; in another year, bushes. 
In an astonishingly short time a vigorous low 
growth clothes the once bare stretch. With the 
advent of the Portuguese, however, and the 



TRURO 141 

always increasing cranberry industry, more 
land is brought under cultivation every year. 
And thus the Cape is gradually being refor- 
ested and ref armed. 

Many travelers to Cape Cod are astonished, 
and a little disappointed, to see green grass and 
sylvan glades where they expected only white 
sand dunes. There are plenty of dunes if one 
knows where to look for them, scattered up 
and down the coast. But in the more fertile 
regions it is difficult to trace the original form- 
ation of the land. If you wish to view mile 
after mile of wild barrens, where the vegeta- 
tion is chiefly moss, and where the sand after 
every storm drifts over the heads of the sub- 
merged bushes and piles up around the decay- 
ing fence rails ; where there is hardly a boulder 
as big as your hand, or even gravel, and the 
layer of soil is so thin that you can kick it off 
with your toe — then go to Truro. Here, more 
easily than anywhere else, — unless it be in 
Provincetown, — you will see land in the 
process of making. 

Cape Cod is sixty-five miles long on the 



142 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

North Shore, and eighty on the South and East. 
The average breadth is six miles, and at Truro 
this narrows down to three. The greatest 
height above the sea is at Scargo Hill in Den- 
nis, which is three hundred feet high. 

The region of Barnstable County is com- 
posed entirely of glacial drift, even to a depth 
of three hundred feet in some places. This was 
brought down in the ice age. A backbone runs 
across the county, and from its height one may 
often, when driving through the wood roads, 
come out, as on a plateau, and catch a glimpse 
of the sea. There is a clay vein, too, which 
starts across the Cape and crops out at Truro 
in the so-called ''Clay Pounds," now crowned 
with a lighthouse, shining two hundred feet 
above the ocean. Clam-shells and oyster-shells 
are sometimes found miles inland, away from 
any breath of the ocean. They are thought to 
be the last traces of some Indian village. 

In spite of the popular conviction that the 
entire Cape is merely one sweep of Sahara-like 
desert, it was thickly forested when Gosnold 
discovered it, and it is in many places richly 



TRURO 143 

wooded to-day, although Naushon alone at- 
tests the noble forests of the past. Those who 
have seen the autumn forests will never forget 
them. Those for whom this great delight is 
still in store cannot do better than to read 
Thoreau's classic description: '*! never saw an 
autumnal landscape so beautifully painted as 
this was. It was like the richest rug imaginable 
spread over an uneven surface ; no damask nor 
velvet, nor Tyrian dye or stuffs, nor the work 
of any loom, could ever match it. There was 
the incredibly bright red of the huckleberry, 
and the reddish brown of the bayberry, min- 
gled with the bright and living green of small 
pitch pines, and also the duller green of the 
bayberry, boxberry, and plum; the yellowish 
green of the shrub oaks, and the various golden 
and yellow and fawn-colored tints of the birch 
and maple and aspen, each making its own 
figure, and, in the midst, the few yellow sand- 
slides on the sides of the hills looked like the 
white floor seen through rents in the rug." 

If one should sail in an aeroplane above 
Barnstable County he would see not only 



144 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

shores and beaches, gardens, orchards, cran- 
berry bogs, groves of trees; lawns and leafy 
thickets; pleasant meadows and hilly slopes 
where grow the aster and the goldenrod, the 
violet and mayflowers in due season; but, as 
he approached Truro, he would see that all 
these things grew fewer. Here, in spite of 
strenuous efforts to fasten down the sand and 
strengthen the harbor shore by planting beach- 
grass and trees, the sand has choked up the 
harbor, and even yet sifts against the houses 
and drifts over the gardens, and in time of 
storm whirls across the narrow strip of land 
until even the humblest cottage may boast 
ground-glass windows. 

In Truro, as in Provincetown, the soil for 
the first gardens was brought over in the hold 
of vessels. Quite naturally farming has never 
been the principal occupation in such a region 
as this. Settled in 1709 by a few English pur- 
chasers from Eastham, — having been previ- 
ously occupied by irresponsible fishermen and 
traders, — it began its career energetically, 
and under the name of '' Dangerfield " it waged 



TRURO 145 

war against the blackbirds and crows, wolves 
and foxes; dug clams, fished by the line and 
net, and watched for whales, in vigorous pio- 
neer fashion. The name of Truro comes from 
the market town in Cornwall. Like other towns 
it had its mackerel fleet, its whalers, and its 
salt industry. In 1830 to 1855 the wharves 
were crowded with sloops and schooners. A 
shipyard was kept busy, and the "turtle-shells 
of the salt-works," which Thoreau notes, were 
dotted all along the shore. Here the first 
Methodist meeting-house on the Cape and 
the second in New England was built. Doubt- 
less it was the prototype of those picturesque 
little structures that are silhouetted against 
the sky to-day. 

When the Revolution put an end to their 
maritime enterprise, the Truro fishermen, like 
the rest of the Cape-Codders, melted up their 
mackerel leads for bullets, and made a record 
so valiant that it will never be forgotten as long 
as American history is read. 

It was from this wind-swept and sand- 
scoured town of twenty-three houses that 



146 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

twenty-eight men gave up their hves for hb- 
erty. The spirit in which they carried out the 
embargo on tea was amazing. Once a brigan- 
tine, loaded with tea, waited outside Truro and 
offered a large reward for transportation serv- 
ices to shore. But not a single inhabitant from 
the town could be prevailed upon to touch a 
single box of the cargo, notwithstanding, as 
the old records state, ''that we had several 
vessels here unemployed." Their determina- 
tion was equaled by their ingenuity. Once, 
when the enemy appeared off the shore, the 
town was defenseless except for a small militia, 
and the British seemed about to land. The 
same sand dunes that make this section so dif- 
ferent from other sections rolled back from the 
coast — then as now. The handful of militia 
took a position behind the inner hill, walked 
over it, and then, hidden by a hill in front, 
walked back, around, and over the first eleva- 
tion again, thus making a procession of theat- 
rical length. This trick — popular in sheet and 
pillow-case parties — deceived the enemy, and 
they sailed away without attempting to land. 



TRURO 147 

If you were a farmer you might fall a victim 
to despair searching for a scrap of soil in the 
lee of some hill into which to thrust a seed. But 
if you are merely a traveler you will be struck 
by the beautiful wild sterility of this section of 
the Cape, recalling similar moors in the roman- 
tic "Lorna Doone" country. You will pause 
for a long look as you reach the top of the hill 
by the Grand View Farm. There you will see 
the red-roofed cottage half hidden by the slope 
and the flash of the sea far beyond. The little 
gardens terraced patiently down the various 
grades will remind you of the Azores, and you 
will not be astonished to hear the farmer speak- 
ing the Portuguese tongue. You will pause 
again as you come out on the hilltop where you 
get your first glimpse of Provincetown, and see 
it lying before you as you have so often seen it 
on the map, beckoning you out — and out . . . 

Fishing and fighting — these were the two 
original industries of this old Indian Pamet. 
And the inhabitants did them both with a will, 
until the sand choked up their harbor and the 
enemy departed from their coast. Now the 



148 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

struggle for existence is more dijSicult and less 
spectacular. The little farmhouses that dot the 
hills testify to the isolation of the lives which 
are lived there. Bay berry candles and beach- 
plum jelly, mayflowers and heather, sent to 
market eke out many a meager household 
stipend, and the smallness of the garden 
patches bear pathetic testimony to the results 
of the season's labor. 

A tiny free library finds its niche at the bot- 
tom of a hill ; the towers of the churches shine 
against the sky, reminding us of that other 
church in far Tintagel where, once a year, at 
Christmas-time, the bells ring out, without the 
touch of human hand. And reminding us, too, 
that the first Methodist meeting-house on the 
Cape and the second in the country was built 
in Truro, in 1794. Down on the shore there is 
a colony of summer folk, and the wide auto- 
mobile road binds Truro to the rest of the 
world. 




Chapter XII 



PROVINCETOWN 

PROVINCETOWN is different from all 
the rest of the Cape : different from all the 
rest of the world — although all *'land's-end" 
places have a certain haunting odor and re- 
semblance. To the Pilgrims, anchoring in the 
harbor almost three hundred years ago, this 
haven of shore bloomed forth like a Paradise. 
They describe it fervently as well wooded with 
"oakes, pines, sassafras, juniper, birch, holly, 
pines, some ash, walnut," and dwell fondly on 
the richness of the forests and the soil. But to 
the pilgrims of to-day — approaching, not in 
a sea-worn cockle of a boat, but in a well- 



150 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

padded motor, or steam-car — this bony, 
crooked finger extending into the ocean is as 
bare and sinister as a skeleton's digit. 

The long road lies between endless dunes of 
sand, partially covered — thanks to the per- 
sistent efforts of the United States Govern- 
ment — with a mantle of beach grass, to keep 
them from shifting. But the wind, permeated 
with the smell of drying fish, fresh fish, de- 
caying fish, sweeps over the thin verdure as 
desolately as it would over a desert. There 
is an eeriness in the interminable approach, 
ghostly and unreal, even in the hot summer 
sunshine. 

Perhaps it is the fantastic structure of the 
dunes, carved in intricate mouldings: some 
with smoothly rounded tops, others combed by 
unseen fingers, others running into spectral 
peaks, and still others with long, flat summits 
— weird sentinels, linked together by the most 
unstable and most resistless chains. No, if the 
Pilgrims had come by the way of land instead 
of by sea, we might never have had a settle- 
ment at Provincetown — only a lighthouse at 



PROVINCETOWN 151 

the menacing tip to warn vessels away from 
danger. 

But they did come, and they anchored grate- 
fully, glad enough to feel earth beneath their 
feet again, after sixty-three days' troublous 
tossing, and they stayed for thirteen days — 
the very first settlement made in this country 
by our forefathers ; and we week-end explorers 
of a softer age, poking our noses into the quaint 
town caught up on this amazing hook, find 
ourselves drawn into an atmosphere more for- 
eign than any other in the United States — 
unless we except St. Augustine. 

We have crossed the sandy bar which leads 
from North Truro, with its scattering cottages 
becoming more frequent nearing the town, and 
here we are on Front Street — the narrowest, 
crookedest thoroughfare, compactly lined with 
ancient cottages, some of them a foot below 
the level of the sidewalk; with hotels, garages, 
shops, and stores; crowded with dark-skinned 
Portuguese and laughing summer folk; with 
artists and natives and tourists and trades- 
men; with automobiles and fishcarts and per- 



152 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

ambulators ; with barefooted children — dark 
and foreign-looking — and with dogs that lie 
in the sun, impeding traffic as unconcernedly 
as do their venerated brothers in the land of the 
Mussulman. 

To your left lie the rotting wharves where 
once the entire living of the community was 
brought. Under your feet are the remnants of 
the famous plankwalk, built after much wrang- 
ling from the town's share of a surplus revenue 
distributed by Andrew Jackson and an ami- 
able Congress in 1837. It was regarded as such 
a preposterous extravagance by some of the 
old inhabitants that they indignantly refused 
to set foot upon it, but plodded righteously in 
the sandy middle of the road until the day of 
their deaths. Concrete is replacing it now, how- 
ever, and the many feet that tread it are quite 
regardless of the old furor. 

Up on Town Hill to your right stands the 
famous Pilgrim Memorial Monument, as stern 
and impressive as the men whose lives it com- 
memorates. It is to this monument that we 
must go first of all, to get the ''lay of the land," 



PROVINCETOWN 153 

and to recall the few historical facts, without 
which it is impossible to understand the mean- 
ing of Provincetown. 

The granite shaft — two hundred and fifty- 
two feet high, thirty feet higher than the one 
on Bunker-Hill — was dedicated in August, 
1910, by the Cape Cod Pilgrim Memorial As- 
sociation, which received a grant from the 
Government on condition that the shaft might 
be used as an observation tower in case of war. 
It is an almost exact reproduction of the 
Torre del Mangia in Sienna, and similar to the 
campanile of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence 
— the sole reason for choosing this design be- 
ing that its austere beauty recommended itself 
to the engineers and architects. The ascent 
is easy — an inclined plane copied from that 
of the Campanile San Marco in Venice, up 
which Napoleon is supposed to have ridden on 
horseback. 

Sailors, when they mount to the top, the 
care-keeper tells us, insist upon clambering up 
to the very pinnacle, where they can be seen 
from the village peering out with delight over 



154 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

the ocean which hes hke a chart before them. 
We, however, will be quite satisfied to remain 
behind the granite pillars of the parapet, and 
look out upon the bended sickle of the Cape. 

Into this harbor glided the Norsemen in 
1004, and again in 1007, hauling up their ves- 
sels for repairs. Although there is always con- 
troversy concerning the ways and days of 
these fleeting rovers, nevertheless a discovery 
of sixty years ago would seem to substantiate 
the theory of their landing here. A house 
was being erected on one of the hills which 
form the background of the village, and four 
feet below the surface of the earth — twenty 
feet below the original crown of the hill — 
the workmen came upon a remarkable struc- 
ture of stone. Since no stone larger than a 
man's fist is to be found in this section of the 
Cape, and as the foundations of the houses are 
invariably of brick, the ruin excited the great- 
est interest. The excavation was carried on 
more carefully, and the lower portion of a 
building of considerable size — of the shape of 
a parallelogram, with two sides still standing 



PROVINCETOWN 155 

at right angles — was brought to hght. One 
corner had evidently been used as a fireplace, 
and there were ashes and the bones of sea- 
fowl and small animals. The stones of the wall 
had been firmly cemented together with a 
cement in which ground shells had been util- 
ized as lime — a mode of structure precisely 
similar to that of the old Stone Mill at New- 
port, of Norse origin. Whatever this building 
was, sealed up in the sands of the Province- 
town dunes, it undoubtedly antedates the 
Pilgrims, as their stay was brief, and Bradford 
mentions no such erection — as he most cer- 
tainly would have done. The Indians left no 
stone records of any kind. Therefore, those 
who like to re-people the present with the past 
have excellent authority for believing that 
Thorwald the Viking was, indeed, here, and 
therefore may be regarded as the discoverer of 
the American Continent. 

Without question other adventurers — Port- 
uguese and Italian — stopped here also, in 
those early days of romantic adventuring, but 
the next authentic date is 1602, when Bar- 



156 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

tholomew Gosnold and John Brereton, setting 
sail from Falmouth, England, anchored off 
this sandy hook, went ashore, tramped around, 
parleyed with the Indians, and caught codfish 
and gave the ever-memorable name to the 
vicinity. After diverse experiences, all of which 
are written down quite fully in the ancient his- 
tories if one cares to read them, they pushed 
off again, found their way to Cuttyhunk, where 
they spent the winter, returning to England 
the following June. 

The next year Martin Pring came, looking 
for sassafras, highly valued by pharmacists. 
After him De Monts and Champlain, in 1605. 
De Poitrincourt came in the early part of the 
century, staying for fifteen days, and taking 
formal possession of the country in the name 
of the French King. Then came John Smith, 
whose map of New England, dated 1614, gives 
the name of Milford Haven to what we know 
as Cape Cod Bay, and that of Stuart Bay to 
the present Massachusetts Bay. Although this 
is regarded by many as the oldest map of New 
England, the chart made by Champlain, from 



PROVINCETOWN 157 

his observations between 1604 and 1607, is 
more complete in its geographical, ethnologi- 
cal, zoological, and botanical information. 
However, that was when this part of the coun- 
try was known as New France, and so, after 
all, John Smith's may be regarded as the old- 
est map of New England, since he gave this 
name to the region he explored. One cannot 
pass by the old maps without speaking of the 
one made, half a century after Champlain's, 
by another Frenchman, De Barre, only excelled 
by that of our own Coast Survey. Thus the 
ante-Pilgrim history of Cape Cod is remark- 
ably well recorded, and with the landing of 
that weary but indefatigable band on Novem- 
ber 11, 1620, the records are entirely complete. 
It is astonishing hov tenacious is the popu- 
lar belief that the first landing of the Pilgrims 
in this country was at Plymouth. It was at 
what is now Provincetown, in this harbor, 
probably at Long Point. Here it was that that 
immortal compact — the earliest example of 
a form of civil government, established by the 
act of the people to be governed — was drawn 



158 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

up and signed in the cabin of the ship. "Per- 
haps," says John Quincy Adams, "the only 
instance in human history of that positive, 
original social compact, which speculative 
philosophers have imagined as the only legiti- 
mate source of government." 

Here then, before our very eyes, looking 
down from this height, is the place in which 
the American Republic was conceived; and 
here, while the men waded ashore to explore, 
and the women promptly instituted the first 
New England wash-day, Dorothy Bradford, 
the wife of the future Governor, slipped into 
the water and was drowned, and Peregrine 
White — that historic infant whose cradle and 
various dwelling-places have been so assidu- 
ously cherished — was born. Births, deaths, 
governmental compacts, and a prodigious wash- 
day — what more is needed to attest to the 
substantiality of the Pilgrim landing.^ 

But although the Pilgrims landed, they did 
not stay. Many of them had caught cold from 
their enforced wading from vessel to land, and 
the bleak shore seemed more instead of less 



PROVINCETOWN 159 

forbidding, as they lingered. But their brief 
visit opens the initial page in American his- 
tory, and bestows without question upon 
Provincetown the legitimate title of the first 
landing of our forefathers. 

Fluctuation is the dominant characteristic of 
Provincetown history: fluctuation as regards 
both land and those who settled upon it. The 
sand, — of which some ingenious statistician 
has reckoned that tWo million tons are displaced 
yearly, — which drifts under the houses and 
over the gardens ; which scours the windows to 
opaqueness and buries driftwood and uncovers 
the roots of trees; which first lures and then 
discourages inquiring prospective inhabitants, 
— is, of course, responsible for the former 
phenomenon, and possibly for the latter. Race 
and soil have an intimate connection. 

After the union of the Plymouth and Massa- 
chusetts Bay Colonies in 1692, Provincetown, 
then a part of Truro, became a fishing hamlet. 
(It sometimes occurs to the casual student of 
early days that this habit of the Pilgrims to 
range forth and dot their fishing stations far 



160 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

and wide, like the twentieth-century milHon- 
aire with *' hunting boxes out df town," is 
rather amusing.) In 1741 it was set off as a 
precinct of the Province of the Massachusetts 
Bay Colony. Thus the name of Provincetown 
was easily arrived at, and with it a rather 
singular arrangement, which kept the title to 
lands in the name of the Colony instead of in- 
dividuals. Those who erected dwelling-houses, 
fish-houses, and wharves within the limits of 
the former precinct occupied the position of 
mere squatters or tenants on sufferance — an 
anomalous condition which continued until 
1893. In this way a populous village grew up, 
with houses, shops, churches, and schools, and 
yet not a single householder held any title to 
the land on which his building stood. When 
the buildings were sold and conveyed, the 
conveyance was in the form of a quitclaim and 
not a warranty. It was less than twenty-five 
years ago that, by a special provision of the 
General Court, a division of the lands was made 
between the township and the Commonwealth, 
the latter reserving to itself a large section of 



PROVINCETOWN 161 

the unoccupied lands of the town, stretching 
from the outskirts of the settled limits of the 
village to the ocean, and conveying to the town 
its title to the settled portion of these lands 
— the title which for two hundred and sixty 
years had belonged to the Colonial Province 
and the State. These Province Lands to-day 
are largely sand dunes which the Government 
is persuading beach grass to cover. 

This unusual civic arrangement was accom- 
panied by a continually ebbing and rising and 
ebbing population. "In 1749," says Douglass 
in his *' Summary," the "town consisted of 
only two or three settled families, two or three 
cows, and about six sheep." By 1755 there 
were ten or fifteen dwellings, but by 1764 the 
town was so insignificant that the census for- 
got it altogether. During the War of 1812 there 
was great depression, and in 1819 we hear that 
"there was only one horse in Provincetown' 
and that was an old white one, with one eye." 
With peace came prosperity : whale-fishing and 
shore and Bank fishing; the manufacture of 
salt and of oil ; fortunes were made in ambergris, 



162 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

and fishing stories assumed enormous propor- 
tions — as of the cUpper JuHa Costa, which 
under a Portuguese skipper set sail at six in 
the morning for fishing grounds about fifteen 
miles northeast of Highland Light, took one 
hundred and fifty thousand pounds of cod, and 
arrived at her Boston moorings an hour before 
midnight. But the discovery of petroleum 
wiped the whaling industry off the map and 
with it the town suffered another decline. 

And now, within a decade, Provincetown 
has come into a new era. The automobilists, 
who scatter their laughter and their largess so 
good-naturedly from one end of the continent 
to another, have discovered it : it is an alluring 
week-end trip. One may, as Thoreau said, 
"stand here and put all America behind him" 
— not a mean achievement by any count. 
Besides the tourists have come flocks of sum- 
mer colonists, artistic and literary folk, who 
live in cottages and shacks and remodeled 
stables and patched-up sheds ; there are schools 
of art and other ephemeral and permanent 
organizations; and all summer long there is a 



PROVINCETOWN 163 

daily boat from Boston with a troop of excur- 
sionists. But the most radical change of all is 
the gradual establishment of the Portuguese 
in the first home of our forefathers. Coming, 
as those original settlers came, across the ocean 
from the east, these smiling men and women 
have, without any spectacular ovation, si- 
lently, persistently, inconspicuously achieved 
the occupation of Provincetown. In the chap- 
ter on Barnstable you will find a study of the 
racial situation on Cape Cod, but if you de- 
scend from the Monument and walk through 
the streets, you will see, in a graphic exposi- 
tion, the amazing preponderance of this quiet, 
comely race. 

Portuguese — Portuguese — Portuguese 
everywhere. They are the fishermen, the store- 
keepers: the men work; their children skip 
rope on the sidewalk; their daughters are 
waitresses in the hotels and teachers in the 
schools. For the passion for education, which 
has always distinguished Cape Cod from the 
time when in 1673 the revenue derived from 
the fisheries was set aside for the schools, seems 



164 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

to have illuminated these latest of Cape-Cod- 
ders. There are Portuguese women who can- 
not speak English ; Portuguese men who marry 
the daughters of Cape Cod stock. There is 
every shade of color from almost black to a 
creamy olive, and every grade of refinement in 
these foreign countenances. Some come from 
the Azores, and some from Portugal, and there 
is more or less of a feud between them, and 
more or less resentment against them all by 
the natives. But they are a thrifty and law- 
abiding people, and here, as elsewhere on the 
Cape, their industry and picturesqueness con- 
tribute something not without value to the 
general life. 

But the skeleton on which the body of 
Provincetown is fashioned — the bones of his- 
tory and ethnology and geography — is not 
the complete picture of this quaintest of all 
the Cape towns. The superficial attributes are 
possibly even more fascinating. 

It is here that we find the quintessence of 
the seafaring atmosphere, for although the 
inhabitants no longer depend exclusively upon 



PROVINCETOWN 165 

the ocean to bring them their means of liveli- 
hood, yet in a place so completely surrounded 
by water, peculiar and charming customs be- 
come an integral part of the daily life. In the 
houses, for instance, one finds cabinets con- 
taining great, curious shells, and shells orna- 
ment the gateposts or mark a line to the front 
walk. The key left in a shop door will dangle 
a shell instead of a billet of wood; henyards 
are occasionally fenced around with pieces of 
an old seine; lobster pots, herring pots, and 
conch shells are set upon the lintels; boats are 
converted into flower beds; and garden beds 
— whose original earth was brought in ships 
from a more generous soil — are neatly outlined 
in scallop shells. The codfish is the favorite 
weather vane, although the swordfish and the 
ship are close behind in popularity; and more 
than one door is kept ajar by a whale's tooth 
wedged underneath. The atmosphere, both 
actually and figuratively, is soaked with salt 
water and the nameless and numberless asso- 
ciations which are part of it. 

One may get a glimpse of Provincetown in 



166 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

an hour; a day is better; a week is better still; 
and a summer is none too much. But no 
glimpse of the present is complete without 
some recollection of the vivid scenes of the 
past. It was in the winter of 1874-75 that 
Provincetown was hermetically sealed by a 
glittering ice-field from Wood End to Mano- 
met — a distance of twenty-two miles. A 
fleet of fishing vessels was caught in the floe, 
and stood there, their hulls, rigging, and taper- 
ing spars encrusted with ice, like fairy vessels 
of glass. It was one immense, crystalline desert 
with signals of distress fluttering from the im- 
mobile craft — a scene of perilous beauty and 
wicked enchantment. Some of the boats were 
abandoned by their crews, who had eaten 
their last crust and burned the bulwarks of 
their vessel for fuel; some were crushed like 
paper under the terrific pressure of sea and ice; 
some were held fast for a month, and only re- 
leased by the breaking-up of the ice floes. It 
is hard for us to stand here and survey the 
peaceful harbor and realize that scene of sav- 
age and miraculous wonder. 



PROVINCETOWN 167 

Shipwrecks without number have occurred 
here. Bradford mentions the Sparrowhawk 
as having been stranded here in 1626, and a 
Uttle more than two hundred years later the 
remains of a hull of an ancient ship were un- 
covered at Nauset Beach in Orleans, embedded 
in the mud of a meadow a quarter of a mile 
from any water that would have floated her. 
The unusual build of the vessel, unsealed from 
its tomb of two centuries, has made the in- 
vestigators feel confident that it was no other 
than this ancient vessel — perhaps the first 
to be dashed to destruction on this fatal coast. 
Another strange occurrence was when the 
British frigate, the Somerset, chased by the 
French fleet on the Back Side, as the Atlantic 
Coast of the Cape is called, struck on Peaked 
Hill Bars, and was flung far up on the beach 
by the terrific force of the waves. Stripped by 
a ''plundering gang from Provincetown and 
Truro," the frigate lay at the mercy of the 
sands, and they gradually hid her even from 
memory. But the strong gales and the high 
tide of 1886 tore the merciful shroud aside and 



168 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

brought the blackened timbers again to Hght. 
"The grim old ship, tormented by relic hunt- 
ers, peered out over the sea, looking from 
masthead to masthead for the Union Jack, 
and, disgusted with what she saw, dived once 
more under her sandy cover, where the beach 
grass now grows over her." 

There was the tragic case of the Brutus, 
which struck on the bars at Cape Race, in 
1802. All the crew reached shore, but froze to 
death. There was also the wreck of the Gio- 
vanni, which, caught in an icy gale, was dis- 
mantled of her rigging before the very eyes of 
the spectators on the shore, who were power- 
less to send aid. It was literally possible to 
stand on the shore and see the seas sweeping 
the decks and roaring about the rigging in 
which the sailors had taken refuge; it was pos- 
sible to see them, one by one, picked off the 
rigging, while the ship settled down into the 
sandy grave the waves were wildly digging. 
Finally the men on shore, utterly impotent, 
saw the last sailor drop down from the frozen 
rigging into the raging ocean, and saw the 



PROVINCETOWN 169 

masts strain, crack, and bend, and crash in 
ruin upon the shattered hull. Here it was that 
the City of Portland was supposed to have 
gone down in 1898. 

It is all over now — those fierce and terrible 
days. The Cape Cod Canal has opened a chan- 
nel of safety for the seagoing ships. The beach 
grass is holding down with a billion fingers the 
dangerous sand that used to drift and bury 
and cut and ruin the houses and roads and 
paths of Province town. On Long Point and 
Race Point and at Wood End, lighthouses 
glitter and beckon the way to safety. The 
story of the life-saving stations and of the his- 
torical wrecks and of the work of the Humane 
Society is perhaps best told at Chatham. 




Chapter XIII 
CHATHAM AND THE LIFE-SAVING SERVICE 

CHATHAM — you must pronounce it 
Chat-ham, like the ham in a sandwich if 
you wish to be correct: Cape-Codders do not 
mumble their words, and give firm accent to 
every syllable; '^Chatum" marks the summer 
cockney — Chatham, then, is one of the very 
loveliest of all the Cape towns. From its shore 
run out myriad little fingers of land, making a 
coast-line which is a maze of "blue inlets and 
their crystal creeks." It seems like a fairy sea, 
swathed in mists or jeweled in sunshine; and 
the land itself, torn into such exquisite tatters, 
partakes somewhat of the lambent shimmer. 
This intricate coast not only distinguishes 



CHATHAM 171 

Chatham externally, but reveals the records of 
her past and explains much of her economic 
career; for these shifting sands have made it 
quite impossible for the town to have had any 
centralizing industry. 

With a coast which is perpetually in a state 
of flux; with chasms being forced open and be- 
ing forced shut; with a constant washing-away 
of the shore in one place and a building-up in 
another — what wonder that the fragments of 
the lighthouses which once stood on the firm 
headlands now strew the beach, and that the 
soil on which they were built mingles with the 
sand of the ocean? Inlets, salt and fresh water 
ponds — there are thirty of these latter in 
Chatham — pierce and thread through this 
whole fascinating region, making a topographi- 
cal delicacy which suggests a lady in a veil 
of mist swathed in lacy garments, with one 
long streamer — the shred of Monomoy — 
fluttering from her neck. But this fantastically 
attired creature is, beneath her smile, only the 
wickedest of sirens, and hundreds and hun- 
dreds of boats, caught on some shoal or reef of 



172 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

her drifting tentacles, have been swirled to 
death; and thousands of voices in the agony 
of death have cursed her through the storm 
for a fiend. 

It takes only a glance at the peculiar jagged 
formation of this part of the Cape to see what 
a perilous place it must be. Even now, with 
the Cape Cod Canal cut through, there are 
wrecks here every year; and before the life- 
saving stations were established, the disasters 
were practically without number. The hook 
of Monomoy and the hook of Provincetown 
have vied with each other in their evil deeds, 
and plunging their beaks into the ocean have 
come up again and again like insatiable hawks 
with victims dangling and dripping with blood 
and water. 

There were no records kept of the disasters 
along this coast previous to the establishment 
of the United States Life-Saving Service in 
1872, except in town records and local histories, 
but some were so memorable that they can 
never be forgotten. Among these are the 
wrecks of the Sparrowhawk, the Brutus, and 



CHATHAM 173 

the Somerset (mentioned in the chapter on 
Provincetown) which were among the first 
vessels in the history of this country to go 
down. Close upon their foaming wakes we see 
a long line of phantom vessels, once floating 
buoyantly upon the water, now sailing on for- 
ever — only in mirage and memory. 

We see the Widdah — that pirate ship whose 
career of crime would do credit to a Peter Pan 
party — with her twenty-three guns and her 
crew of one hundred and thirty men. It was 
in April, 1718, that she captured seven prizes, 
and in order to get them to shore put some of 
her crew on each of them. But the captain of 
one of them, seeing that the pirates who had 
been transferred to his ship were drunk, craft- 
ily anchored in Provincetown Harbor, where 
the seven pirates were apprehended and after- 
ward tried and executed in Boston. The Wid- 
dah herself was inveigled across the shoals, 
where she struck, and, a storm rising, was 
wrecked. The news of the pirate fleet prompted 
the Government to send Captain Southack to 
the scene to see that the wreck should not be 



174 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

plundered, and the story of his miraculous voy- 
age is given in the chapter on Orleans. One 
hundred and two men were buried on the beach 
at that one time, and eight of the pirates were 
hung. There is still a legend drifting about of 
a man of frightful and singular aspect who 
used to visit the Cape every season. He would 
never speak to any one, but his ejaculations 
during his sleep — ribald and blasphemous — 
convinced the people of this region that he had 
been one of the pirate crew, and that he had 
come to visit a concealed hoard of gold. When 
he died a belt filled with gold pieces was found 
about his waist. The Widdah is only one of 
that spectacular procession of phantom ships 
which pass before our memory. We see the 
Josephus, a British vessel with a cargo of iron 
rails, striking on the Peaked Hill Bars. Her 
crew were driven to the rigging from whence 
their anguished cries could be heard to the 
mainland. Heroic life-savers hurled themselves 
into the tempest, and they and the wailing 
crew and the ship itself, before the eyes of the 
horror-stricken watchers on the shore, were 



CHATHAM 175 

ground to atoms by the monstrous waves. We 
see the immigrant ship, the FrankHn, deliber- 
ately run ashore in 1849 near Gaboon's Hol- 
low, and we still hear the shrieks of the victims 
of that fearful crime. In the year 1853 we see 
no less than twenty-three appalling disasters 
along the shores of Cape Cod. The weather 
was bitterly cold, and at the time when the ves- 
sels were lost such violent storms swept the 
coast that nothing could be done to succor the 
drowning crews. Those who did reach the shore 
died upon the desolate uplands and beaches. 
We see the White Squall, a blockade-runner, 
who came safely home the long way from 
China; but when she struck the back of the 
Cape she went down in total wreckage. The 
Aurora, with palm oil from the west of Africa; 
the Clara Bella, coal-laden; the bark Giovanni, 
with wine from the happy fields of Italy; the 
iron ship Jason, with its loss of twenty -four 
lives; the steamer City of Portland, in 1898, 
lost, no one knows where, but whose last 
wreckage was washed up on this shore — all 
too quickly and too tragically do these phan- 



176 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

torn ships press upon each other as we recall 
them, with their divers cargoes and brave re- 
cords behind them. They are vanished now, 
and their shattered hulks are part of the drift- 
wood that flecks the shores. Even their names 
and the names of their passengers and crews 
are fading on the pages of those old marine 
books which fill a small corner in every Cape 
Cod library. 

In spite of the number and horror of these 
catastrophes it was not until 1871 that Con- 
gress appropriated the two hundred thousand 
dollars which made a Life-Saving Service pos- 
sible. Previously to this, the Massachusetts 
Humane Society, a private charity, was the 
sole agent of rescue along this entire coast. 
This society, which still continues such excel- 
lent work along salt and fresh water basins, is 
one of the oldest in the world. It originated its 
coast service more than thirty-six years before 
the English; while the French service did not 
come into being until very much later. Estab- 
lished in 1786 and incorporated a few years 
later, the society began its organized relief not 



CHATHAM 177 

only along Cape Cod, but along the whole 
Atlantic Coast as far as it could, by placing 
huts along the shore in desolate places where 
shipwrecked persons might be cast. These 
huts held boats, first-aid kits, flares for light- 
ing, etc., and were dependent upon volunteer 
crews. ^ Although the State and the Federal 
Governments were appreciative of the serv- 
ices rendered by the society, — as is shown by 
substantial contributions from time to time, 

— yet both State and Federal Governments 
were very slow in assuming the responsibilities 
which were obviously theirs, and not a private 
charity's. As early as 1797 the town of Truro 
sold the United States Government a tract of 
land for a lighthouse, where Highland Light 

— the first on the Cape — was built. But it 
was not until seventy-five years later that the 
first life-saving station was erected. Now there 
are stations about every five miles from Prov- 
incetown to Monomoy — at Wood End, Race 
Point, Peaked Hill Bars, High Head, High- 

^ The first building of this kind was erected at Lovell's 
Island in Boston Harbor in 1807. 



178 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

lands, Pamet River, Cahoon's Hollow, Nauset, 
Orleans, Old Harbor, Chatham, Monomoy, 
and Monomoy Point. 

Picture to yourself a small, plain house, set 
upon a sand dune, yet out of reach of high 
water, painted red so that it is visible from 
quite a distance, and further distinguished by 
a tall flagstaff. You enter and find, on the first 
floor, five rooms : a mess-room which also serves 
as a sitting-room for the crew; a kitchen; a 
keeper's room; a boat-room; and beach ap- 
paratus room. There are wide, double-leafed 
doors opening out upon a sloping platform 
down which the surf -boat may be quickly run. 
On the second floor are two rooms: one con- 
tains cots for the crew and the other for rescued 
persons. This is a United States Life-Saving 
Station, and here the keeper lives throughout 
the year. From August 1 to June 1 of the fol- 
lowing year he has with him a crew of life- 
savers whose exploits would honor any Book 
of Brave Deeds. During July and August, as 
there are practically no big storms, the men 
have a vacation. As most of them live near, it 



CHATHAM 179 

is easy to summon them in case of need. It is 
during these summer months, when the crew 
are away and the sea is calm, that the keeper 
not infrequently moves his family into the sta- 
tion, and more than one yachtsman has en- 
joyed the hospitality of such an improvised 
home, and delighted summer visitors have 
joined in the clambakes on the beach. 

But when the summer sun grows wintry and 
the ocean begins to mutter, then the yachts- 
men and the summer folk depart, and the life- 
savers assemble for their ten months of stern 
service. There are drills every day, of course: 
drills in launching and landing the lifeboats 
through the surf; flag drills and lantern drills 
in the International and General Code of 
Signaling; drills with beach apparatus and 
breeches buoy; resuscitation drills. Every man 
knows in detail every act he is to perform in 
every emergency. If, in one month after the 
opening of the active season, a crew cannot 
effect a mimic rescue within five minutes, it is 
considered that they have been remiss in drill- 
ing. Of course, in time of actual storm no such 



180 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

celerity is possible : here, the surf, the currents, 
and the stranded craft herself all conspire 
against the work of rescue. Frequently the 
horses which are kept at every station refuse 
to pull the cart which carries the apparatus, 
and their heads have to be covered before they 
can be induced to go out into the fury of the 
elements. It is obvious that all the drilling 
would go for naught unless the men, beside 
being well trained, were temperamentally 
brave and quick-witted in time of danger. 

On clear days a watch is kept from every 
station from the lookout tower. Thus every 
single vessel that is sighted is recorded, and in 
case of non-arrival can be quickly traced to 
the last place where she was sighted. On foggy 
days and in thick weather, when one could not 
see from the lookout, a patrol is kept, just like 
the night patrol. This patrol is faithful to the 
last degree, and all night long, in snow and 
blizzard, with the thermometer below zero and 
the wind blowing fifty miles an hour, over 
quicksands and ''cut throughs" on the beach 
through which the seas rush through to the 



CHATHAM 181 

lowlands — in all times and weathers, the 
silent guard keeps watch along the coast of 
the Cape. 

It is arranged in this way: The night is di- 
vided into four watches; two surf men at each 
station are assigned to each watch ; at the des- 
ignated time they set out from the station in 
opposite directions, keeping well down on the 
beach as near the surf as possible. Midway 
between each station is a little halfway house. 
Here the two surfmen from the neighboring 
stations meet, get warm, exchange checks to 
prove that both of them have made the ap- 
pointed trip, and then return. As there are 
telephones between the halfway station houses 
and the stations, any delay or absence of a surf- 
man can immediately be reported, and search- 
ers sent out to find if he is in trouble — for 
the walk is often a hazardous one beset with 
dangers — or if he is in need of help for some 
vessel in distress. At each end of the route, 
where there is no "halfway house," the men 
punch a time clock to record the hour of their 
arrival. 



182 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

Those who hve in cities or inland villages 
rarely comprehend the necessity or the dif- 
ficulties of this service. The elements are so 
chained by man's ingenuity on land that many 
people have almost forgotten the savage wild- 
ness of a storm at sea. To them stories of the 
bravery of these surfmen — keeping to their 
patrol in spite of blizzards that half blind and 
wholly numb them; through storm tides and 
tempests, along exposed beaches where the 
wind lashes a million whips of icy terror — 
seem as far away as stories of the Arabian 
Nights. But all night and every night, while 
inlanders are snugly sleeping, the patrol 
marches up and down the coast, guarding 
those on shore from sudden shock of flood, and 
ready with all the assistance that man has ever 
devised for the help of man at sea. Some of 
these means of assistance are the result of 
years of scientific study. The idea of a life- 
boat was first conceived by a London coach- 
maker, and the present boat is the result of a 
century of patient experimentation. Any one 
who has ever seen the surfmen handling one 



CHATHAM 183 

of these boats — so light that they can be 
quickly run down the beach, and yet so strong 
that they can withstand the most tumultuous 
waves — knows something of the extraordi- 
nary skill that has gone into the making of such 
a craft and its handling. The method of estab- 
lishing communication between a stranded 
vessel and the shore by means of a mortar is 
over a century old and was worked out by 
Lieutenant Bell, of the British Royal Artil- 
lery, in 1791. He demonstrated the practica- 
bility of the mortar, which could carry a heavy 
shot four hundred yards from a vessel to the 
shore. Later the mortar was used to send a 
line over the vessel from the shore. 

The duties of the life-savers do not consist 
in merely saving human lives in time of storm 
or in assisting them after they are rescued. 
This service saves hundreds of stranded ves- 
sels and their cargoes from complete or par- 
tial destruction; it protects wrecked property 
from plunderers and further ravages of the 
elements; it averts numerous disasters by 
flashing signals of warning to vessels in danger; 



184 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

it assists the Custom-House Service in col- 
lecting revenues of the Government, and pre- 
vents smuggling; in time of flood or tidal waves 
it cares for those on shore as well as those at 
sea. Furthermore, it keeps a valuable record, 
not only of passing vessels, but of the condition 
of the surf and the weather, barometer and 
thermometer. And finally, it is a valuable part 
of the national defense. When we declared 
war against Germany, the Coast Guard auto- 
matically became (under a law newly passed 
by Congress) an integral part of the Navy of 
the United States. It is now a branch of the 
naval service; its personnel is regularly en- 
listed and armed with rifles, and each one of 
its stations provided with a machine gun. 

Under the head of the Coast Guard is also 
the Revenue Cutter Service. These cutters, 
owned by the Government, are ready at all 
times to tow boats to places of safety. Thus, 
when some vessel is sighted from a life-saving 
station, laboring along under a load of lime or 
stone, and evidently in distress, word is sent 
the Acushnet at Wood's Hole or to the Gres- 



CHATHAM 185 

ham at Boston, which comes as promptly as 
possible and tows the boat out of her diffi- 
culties, and possibly to her port of destina- 
tion. This saves the vessel the price of a tow- 
boat — a fee which might be half the value of 
the craft and quite beyond her power to pay. 
Boats of this sort get into trouble more fre- 
quently at Chatham than at any other place, 
although the whole '* pitch of the Cape" — 
as this back side is called — is extremely dan- 
gerous. 

Tales of wreck, tales of heroism, tales of 
tragedy and comedy are an integral part of 
the story of the Life-Saving Service along the 
Cape. And Chatham, with its fine summer 
hotels and fine summer houses, with its wind- 
mill on the hill, trimmed with red like a pic- 
ture in a nursery book, marks, for all its ap- 
parent nonchalance, the most perilous spot of 
a perilous coast. Here, times without number, 
men have dashed themselves into the ravenous 
surf to save the lives of other men whom they 
had never seen, while shrieks of anguish, such as 
safe inlanders have never heard, have reached 



186 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

the listening shore. Here many a spar has been 
washed up on the beach, bearing a burden of 
the dead such as only the waves can witness. 

Well may the bathers dance along the happy 
shore during the summer sunshine ! Far out to 
sea on every hand there is a moaning which 
neither wind can stifle nor sunshine allay — 
the moaning of a perpetual dirge for those who 
have perished along this crystal coast. 




A-*^^^ 




Chapter XIV 



HARWICH AND THE CAPE COD SCHOOLS 

EVER since 1670, when Cape Cod estab- 
lished the first public schools in this 
country, maintaining them with funds from the 
fisheries tax, — no mean drain upon the scanty 
resources of hard-working pioneers, — this 
section of New England has been famed for its 
excellent educational facilities. 

This establishment of public schools was a 
prodigious feat, requiring a high degree of ini- 
tiative. For we must remember that the com- 
mon-school system was not one of the institu- 
tions transplanted by our forefathers from the 
mother country, but one which grew^ out of 



188 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

the necessities of their situation. In the Old 
World from which they came they had been 
used to family education in the home, and this 
practice was maintained by the colonists with 
conscientious fidelity until they worked out 
the beginnings of our present public-school sys- 
tem for the more general education of youth. 
We notice the effects of this long-continued 
and well-standardized teaching in this region, 
not only by the general high intelligence of its 
inhabitants, — for they are innately a keen, 
sagacious type, — but in their manner of ad- 
dress, their choice of words, and their ability 
to express themselves. 

An Indian woman from Mashpee will, while 
working in your kitchen, inquire, *'Is this the 
appropriate dish in which to serve the pota- 
toes.^" And the man who plants your garden 
or sells you fish will ask questions and answer 
them, and throw in a little philosophy on the 
side, with a more cultivated diction than many 
of the summer folk who employ him. 

Travelers, particularly those from the West, 
are often struck by the pleasing quality of 



HARWICH 189 

voice and astonishingly correct enunciation of 
a child by the roadside — whether that child 
be a native, a Portuguese, or an Indian. Of 
course, there are plenty of provincialisms of 
speech, and idioms, succinct and terse. Ad- 
vice as to managing your automobile is fre- 
quently couched in nautical terms: you are 
warned, in diverse exigences, not to *'sail too 
close to the wind," or, "don't get becalmed." 
Directions on land as well as sea often include 
suggestions that you "tack to leeward." There 
is a nasal tang to many voices, probably due to 
climatic influences. But, as a whole, the Cape- 
Codder is conspicuous for his well-spoken hab- 
its and for his stock of accurate and wide in- 
formation. There are no little dark pockets 
hidden in the hills, such as one finds in the 
Berkshires, where isolation and ignorance have 
brought about conditions quite as appalling — 
if not as widespread — as those among the 
mountaineers in Kentucky. Every child in 
every hamlet here goes to school. There are 
less than one hundred illiterates of school age 
in the whole extent of Barnstable County — 



190 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

and these few are where the foreign element 
has recently settled in large numbers. There 
are thirteen high schools in the fifteen towns 
which make up this county, and over twenty- 
four thousand dollars are spent annually in 
transporting the children to and from various 
neighborhoods to these same high schools. 
There are about two hundred and fifty teachers 
employed, the majority of them college or 
normal-school graduates. It is easy to bewail 
the fact that Cape Cod is yearly losing so many 
of her sons and daughters to the city, but 
surely a community which can send its chil- 
dren out to Chicago, San Francisco, and Lon- 
don, to take prominent parts in great business 
there, should not feel more bereft than the 
mother, who, after bringing up a healthy and 
ambitious family, sees it scatter to new and 
better fields of endeavor. The Cape Cod boys 
and girls have a trick of moving away — per- 
haps they inherited it from those ancestors who 
sailed to China and the Philippines, coming 
home, in due time, as gladly as they had gone. 
To-day the returning Cape-Codders come back 



HARWICH 191 

as summer people, and in the meanwhile their 
empty places have been quietly filled by an 
influx of aliens — dark-eyed Portuguese and 
eager Finns, Indian children and others too 
dark to claim that blood. The pedagogical 
machinery takes up this heterogeneous mass, 
as it took up the children of the Puritans, and 
hammers and moulds and grinds into shape — 
pushing each generation a little in advance of 
the one before it. In certain districts the ma- 
chinery labors a little, but as yet the immigra- 
tion has not become so overwhelming as to 
clog the wheels of progress. 

Harwich, besides having the largest and 
finest town hall on the Cape, and one of the 
most extensive village greens, — Brooks Park, 
— has an admirable educational record. It is 
here that education receives the largest town 
appropriation, and here that the first agricul- 
tural school in Barnstable County and the 
third in the State was opened. It was here that 
Sidney Brooks founded the Brooks Seminary 
in 1844 and served as its head for twenty-two 
years. The first vocational course offered in 



192 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

America was offered here, conducted by Sid- 
ney Brooks, and was, quite fittingly, a course 
in navigation. 

The Brooks Seminary became the town high 
school in 1883, and remains so to-day — still 
carrying the banner of progressiveness high. 
Before the enactment of the Act of 1911, which 
provided for the establishment of agricultural 
departments in high schools under State aid 
and supervision, Harwich petitioned the Board 
of Education for such a department. It was 
granted, and established in 1912, and has done 
much to revivify agricultural interest on the 
lower Cape. Furthermore, when it took part 
in the Vocational Exhibit at the Panama 
Pacific Exhibition, it won the Grand Prize for 
Massachusetts. 

But the passion for learning is not confined 
to one town. The Sandwich Academy was in- 
corporated in 1804, and was a matter of great 
pride to the whole county until it was under- 
mined at last by sectarian differences. The 
Academy in Falmouth was founded in 1835, 
and the one in Truro in 1840. Nor did the in- 



.^/. 




HARWICH 193 

fluence of these zealous scholars stop here. 
Samuel Lewfe, a native of Falmouth, was 
known as the father of the common schools 
of Ohio, over which he was superintendent 
for fifty years. One likes to recall the well- 
grounded and long-established reputation of 
such schools and such schoolmasters. 

Of course, the most famous school on the 
Cape to-day is the Normal School at Hyannis. 
Established for twenty years, it has both win- 
ter and summer courses, and to it have come 
many foreign students and educators, seeking 
courses of study in this country. 

But to go back to Harwich. At the time 
when Harwich was incorporated, in 1694, it 
had been enjoined by law upon every town in 
the Province, *' having the number of fifty 
householders or upward," to have a ''school- 
master to teach children and youth to read and 
write." Those having the "number of a hun- 
dred families or householders" were required 
to have a grammar school set up and taught 
by "some discreet person of good conversa- 
tion, well instructed in the tongues." It was 



194 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

not until 1708 that "enough famUies'* were 
found in Harwich. Even after the families 
assembled, in the gradual course of settlement, 
and Mr. Asbon was selected as schoolmaster, 
no schoolhouse was built, and the town of- 
fered "nine pence a week for a convenient 
house to keep school in" — sl rent which ap- 
pears to have been satisfactory, for the school 
evidently proceeded. Of Mr. Asbon, teaching 
the progeny of fifty colonial families, — one 
remembers with a sigh the size of those fami- 
lies, — in accommodations procured by nine 
pence a week, the records are mercifully brief. 
But of his successor, Mr. Philip Selew, we hear 
a great deal. This worthy gentleman was 
schoolmaster in Harwich for over fifty years, 
receiving for his labors forty-eight pounds a 
year. Surely all the honors that have since 
gathered around his name were only scant rec- 
ompense for a half -century of heroic toil. 

The educational record of Harwich is not its 
only claim to distinction. Originally, of course, 
fishing was its chief occupation. Sixty years 
ago the water front was alive with shipping: 



HARWICH 195 

vessels came ^and went; the wharves were 
throbbing with hfe; and Harwich capital was 
largely invested in Harwich vessels, built on 
the banks of Herring River. Cranberry cul- 
ture followed, and later this prosperous town, 
named for the old port in Essex County, Eng- 
land, supported within its borders a sash and 
blind factory; a tanning business; a watch busi- 
ness; and also a sail-making one. Now its 
chain of fresh-water lakes, rich in bass, pick- 
erel, and perch, sparkle a perpetual invitation 
to the fisherman, while the one million dollars 
that the town has spent on its ninety miles of 
highway during the past thirteen years, beckon 
to the motorist. Harwichport, West Harwich, 
Harwich Center, South and East Harwich, 
are all dotted with summer homes. Transients 
double the population for six months in the 
year, and the long beaches are bright with 
bathers during the summer weeks. 

It is not possible to leave the subject of the 
educational life of the Cape without mention- 
ing the free public library. Every traveler 
must have noticed the handsome and com- 



196 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

plete libraries in this region — many of them 
gift or memorial buildings. But the branch 
libraries are even more significant than the 
main ones. It is charming to see some gray 
cottage tucked in the friendly lee of a hill that 
has been its shelter for a hundred years and 
more, bearing above its ancient door the sign 
"Library." By the side of the road, or half- 
way across the meadow or in peaceful nearness 
to the local cemetery, these little "branch li- 
braries" are the inconspicuous but vital centers 
for culture throughout the length and breadth 
of the Cape, testifying poignantly to the men- 
tal alertness of the Cape-Codder. 

Those "trippers" whose travels have taken 
them over foreign lands will have to think a 
long time before they can remember any coun- 
try where the institutions of learning compare 
with those which dot this small section of the 
United States. Schools and libraries — free 
to all who will — are an integral part of the 
atmosphere and architecture of Cape Cod. 
We Americans are justified in a proper pride 
in the system which keeps the fires of learning 



HARWICH 



197 



burning brightly, and which manages every 
year to swallow a greater and even greater 
mass of raw material and turn it out in nego- 
tiable human form. 










I 











Chapter XV 
FALMOUTH THE PROSPEROUS 

FALMOUTH — a town of dignity and 
repute; a town of handsome exterior and 
honorable sons and daughters. Proud and 
progressive, Falmouth has, for two hundred 
and thirty years, maintained her prestige in 
the annals of Cape Cod. 

On your entrance to the town you are struck 
with the air of pleasant prosperity. The Village 
Green, that touch of "City Planning" which, 
for all its naive associations, still remains an 
incomparably effective landscape touch; the 
well-built, well-cared-f or houses of comfortable 
dimensions and admirable proportions; and the 
church with the ivy-clad chapel by the gleam- 
ing pond — all sustain this genial atmosphere. 



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FALMOUTH THE PROSPEROUS 199 

Nor are these things superficial features. 
They are the proper expressions of a long and 
worthy life. Falmouth has won her prestige 
fairly. Ever since she attained her autonomy 
— in 1686 when she and her twin sister of 
Rochester became the sixty-sixth and sixty- 
seventh Massachusetts towns — she has mer- 
ited the admiration that has flowed to her. 

All Cape Cod communities have had their 
experience with coasting, shipbuilding, whal- 
ing, and salt-making, and Falmouth is no ex- 
ception to the rule. But in spite of her excel- 
lent career in these lines — extending over 
one hundred and sixty years — she has drawn 
her life more from the land than from the 
water. Very early in her history she established 
herself agriculturally, and opened the Fal- 
mouth Bank, with a capital of one hundred 
thousand dollars, in 1821. An intelHgent 
mother, she has spent liberally on her schools, 
churches, and public buildings, and now, like 
that mother with her work well done, she re- 
counts with modest but firm pride the worthy 
records of her sons. It is these sons, returning 



200 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

after years in the busier, more distant places of 
the world, who were originally responsible for 
the colonies of summer houses which encircle 
the town on every side. There is much wealth 
here — although unostentatiously displayed ; 
many traditions, quietly but tenaciously pre- 
served. It is this social order, squarely built 
upon the substantial foundations of upright 
living, that makes a civic structure of definite 
value and beauty. 

The Old Colony Records of 1686 call Fal- 
mouth ''Suckannesset," but the dearer Eng- 
hsh name of the famous seaport in Cornwall 
was soon given her by English-speaking 
tongues. Although her history as a town does 
not actually begin until 1686, yet twenty-five 
years earlier than that there were houses built 
near Salt and Fresh Ponds. The inhabitants 
of one of these houses — the Hatches — an- 
chored on the evening of their arrival among 
the tall flags of the pond. There the first 
white child born in Falmouth saw the light, 
and in honor of the rushes which had been his 
cradle was appropriately named Moses. 



FALMOUTH THE PROSPEROUS 201 

The town drew its population from Barn- 
stable, Plymouth, and Sandwich, and it brings 
the past suddenly close to glance at the names 
of those first settlers and see how many of 
them are familiar to-day in this vicinity — 
Gifford, Lawrence, Nye, Dimmick, Swift, 
Phinney, Robinson, Davis. For all its impor- 
tations and exportations, these names and a 
few others still remain a part of the local life, 
sustaining the continuity of background and 
association through the years. 

For quite a while after they settled here 
many of these stanch pioneers kept up their 
connection with the church at the Great 
Marshes — the prettier name for Barnstable. 
We to-day, with automobiles and railroads 
at our door, and finding it difficult to get to 
church at all, pause for a moment, wondering, 
at that old-fashioned efficiency which made it 
possible for men to build houses and ships and 
roads, to defend their country from wolves and 
weather and a foreign army, and still "main- 
tain their connection" with a church a long 
half-day's drive away. However, this affilia- 



202 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

tion was not necessary very long; in a year 
Falmouth had its own place of worship and its 
own preacher. 

Salutary as the establishment of a local 
church always is, yet in this case one is inclined 
to believe that the town owes much of its 
temperate living and kindly humanity to quite 
another source, the Quakers, who still maintain 
their meeting-house on the main road to Fal- 
mouth Town, and still infuse their peace into 
the fevered life of a hurrying age. Shamefully 
treated by Sandwich,^ the inoffensive sect 
timidly sought an entrance into the shelter 
of this more liberal community a few years 
after the first settlers. A mild and peaceful 
folk, they were accepted as friends and citizens 
immediately, and even "cleared" of a minis- 
terial tax — an unheard-of concession in those 
orthodox days. Their gray meeting-house, un- 
adorned by belfry or turret, stands tranquilly 
by the side of the State road, with the open 
sheds, where the horses are tied during service, 
still in use, although to-day more automobiles 

^ See chapter iii. 



FALMOUTH THE PROSPEROUS 203 

than horses fiirthem. Behind and at one side 
on the slope of the hill is the graveyard dotted 
with small stones, — all gray, all uniform, — 
the lack of worldly rivalry fittingly expressed 
in the last habitation which these saintly folk 
have built with hands. Methodism — the 
*' religion of the frontier and the backwoods" 
as Phelps has called it — is the most popular 
denomination on the Cape, although one sees 
an Episcopalian or Baptist, and of later years 
a Roman Catholic, edifice more and more 
frequently. But the Friends' Meeting-House, 
built in 1842 in its frame of cheerful grave- 
yard, breathes a unique benediction upon this 
township. It may be due to this influence 
that, in spite of the sad and cruel lists of mis- 
deeds toward the Indians which blot the pages 
of Massachusetts history, not one of them can 
be traced to Falmouth. She bought her land 
honestly and paid for it fairly ; her personal re- 
lations with the Indians were uniformly just; 
the Indian burial-ground on the hilltop over- 
looking a pond was reverenced and unmo- 
lested for over two hundred years. Thus, one 



204 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

more strand of contentment was woven into 
the felicitous woof of this happy local chron- 
icle. 

The happiest nations, like the happiest 
women, says George Eliot, have no history. 
In a sense this is true of Falmouth. She has 
escaped fire, pestilence, and calamity; her 
books are clear of any grievous offense. Even 
in the Revolution, when she was twice bom- 
barded by the British, and when, as in the 
Civil War, she gave most generously of money 
and of men, she did not suffer violence. To be 
sure, in 1773 there was an epidemic which at- 
tacked the oysters, and, in spite of palliative 
efforts, extinguished their existence in this vi- 
cinity. And later there was a harrowing con- 
troversy to decide whether the alewives should 
have the right of way to Coonenosset Pond. 
This affair became so bitter that a cannon in 
charge of the anti-herring party was prema- 
turely discharged, killing the gunner and the 
controversy at the same time. Also, again in 
early days, every householder was required to 
"kill six old and twelve young blackbirds, or 



FALMOUTH THE PROSPEROUS 205 

four jays and deliver them to the selectmen 
or pay 3^ for delinquency." Occasionally 
wolves needed sanguinary attention. But, 
read in the lenient light of history, these 
slaughters seem very light indeed, compared 
to the enforced savageries of many a Puritan 
town. 

Falmouth has never been conspicuous in 
commercial or maritime undertakings. No 
mighty ships were ever launched here; the glass 
works followed the salt-works into easy obliv- 
ion. It has raised good English hay — more 
than other townships; it has incorporated a 
system of diking to convert much of the salt 
marsh into meadow land; and it has always 
had time to emphasize the pleasure and the 
profit of virtuous living. 

The New England town at its best is one 
of the most charming settlements in Chris- 
tendom; and here we have it at its best. There 
are numerous small hamlets and colonies in 
the twelve-mile township of Falmouth. Chapa- 
quoit is one of the most fashionable resorts on 
this side of the Atlantic seaboard; Falmouth 



206 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

Heights one of the most popular. And these, 
as well as the country sisters, such as North 
Falmouth and Hatch ville, are all tinctured with 
the gracious personality of their mother town. 

Professor James Winthrop, of Harvard, 
coming down by chaise to survey this portion 
of the Cape in 1791, mentions Falmouth as a 
pleasant town, "but out of repair." In highly 
intelligent fashion she has extracted both the 
sweetness and the stimulant from this ancient 
criticism. She is still the pleasantest of all the 
pleasant towns, and no longer could those 
swept and garnished streets — well shaded and 
well oiled — be called " out of repair." For un- 
pretentious as these may appear, one will do 
well to remember that Falmouth ranks sixth in 
wealth among all the towns of Massachusetts, 
her tax valuation in 1914 being $16,554,745, 
exceeded only by Brookline, Milton, Wellesley, 
Winchester, and Manchester. 

One should not leave Falmouth without tak- 
ing the four-mile drive to Wood's Hole, dis- 
tinguished in the nineteenth century as a whal- 
ing and shipbuilding station. The Pacific 



FALMOUTH THE PROSPEROUS 207 

Guano Company had its headquarters here, 
and was the magnet which, in 1879, drew the 
long iron rails of the Old Colony Railroad 
down to this remote corner. Under another 
name it carries many a passenger nowadays 
to catch the boat to Nantucket or to New Bed- 
ford, or to bring him back from his holiday at 
Martha's Vineyard. 

But even if you have no intention of taking 
the boat from Wood's Hole, you should not 
miss going there for a few hours, to see its rose 
garden and its Marine Biological Station. 

You will come to the rose garden first, and 
although it is private property you are quite 
welcome to open the rustic gate and walk in, 
stay as long as you please, and wander where 
you will. There are two acres of roses here: 
teas, ramblers, climbers, trailers; tiny little 
yellow buds; great cabbagy pink ones; there is 
an arbor and a pergola draped with the Evan- 
geline; and the pink and crimson ramblers 
clamber over the buildings like laughing pick- 
aninnies swarming over a fence. Here stands 
a pure white rose — calm marmoreal, faultless; 



208 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

there flames a scarlet one; and yonder palest 
pink melts into palest yellow. Here at your 
feet is a brilliant host of cerise and salmon, 
red and cream, tended by kneeling men who 
know the foliage as well as the blossom of each 
particular one of the thousand bushes. People 
come from all over the world — from Florida 
and Oregon and Canada and Australia and 
France — to study these roses and to place 
their orders for bushes. And you, even if you 
have no order to give, but only a few minutes 
to spare in communion with beauty — you are 
quite welcome also. If you were in Holland, 
you would not think of passing by one of 
the famous tulip nurseries. If you "sight-see" 
in America, you should pause by the gate of 
Miss Fay's rose garden in Wood's Hole: pause, 
then lift the latch, and enter. 

As for the Marine Biological Laboratory, it 
is quite as fascinating in its way as the rose 
garden. If you are of a serious turn of mind 
you may be interested to know something 
about its origin, its purpose, and its accom- 
plishment; if you are merely curious, you will 



FALMOUTH THE PROSPEROUS 209 

like to loiter for a quarter-hour in the small 
public aquarium where certain specimens are 
kept. Perhaps even the seriously minded will 
stop here for a few moments before turning to 
the less pictorial departments of the institu- 
tion. For it is always amusing to watch fish 
through glass, which shows you the surface of 
the water from the under side instead of from 
the top. Always amusing to see the skate — 
as flat as paper against the glass ; the dogfish, 
silver greyhounds of the ocean, and the squid, 
like shrouded ladies, moving first forward and 
then back, their translucent veils undulating 
behind them. The puffers are tremendously 
important creatures, and in that case beyond 
the minnows are as thick as Fords on a Sun- 
day afternoon. The jeweled-eyed sea-robins, 
muffled in their orange-colored fins and gills, 
remind one of a frivolous girl lapped in red fox 
furs, that flutter ^as she walks. And what an 
ominousness about the sharks that go 

"sailing by — 
Sail and sail with unshut eye — 
Round the world for ever and aye." 



210 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

Through the next door is the museum, and 
here to the uninitiated eye the rows of glass 
jars, with their strange preserved specimens of 
sponge, jellyfish, coral, and seaweeds, seem 
like vessels in some unholy kitchen — where dia- 
bolical fruits and ghastly condiments are await- 
ing the feast of a Frankenstein. 

This Marine Biological Station, like the one 
at Beaufort, North Carolina, and at Fairport, 
on the Mississippi River, in Iowa, is under the 
direct control of the Bureau of Fisheries, Wash- 
ington. Although many important investiga- 
tions were carried out here during the early 
years of the Bureau, it was not until 1883 that 
the present permanent establishment was 
created. Now there is a hatchery and labora- 
tory building, a residence for the superintend- 
ent and the director of the laboratory and the 
scientific staff during the summer, a pump- 
house and coal-shed, a workshop and store- 
house, and extensive wharves enclosing a stone 
basin. One or more steam vessels are detailed 
to the station, and there is ample equipment of 
launches and small boats. The scientific work 



FALMOUTH THE PROSPEROUS 211 

is largely achieved during the summer, and 
for the remainder of the year the station is 
devoted to fish culture. This fish culture is 
carried on in the large room which is at the left 
as you enter the building. Any one may enter, 
but probably only those who have had special 
training will understand the hatching appa- 
ratus unless it is explained to them. During 
the summer you are not so likely to see the 
machinery in working order. You may, how- 
ever, study the hatching-tables, each one of 
which is provided with twelve compartments. 
Each compartment has two partitions near the 
ends: one fixed, the other movable. Between 
the two is a box with a scrim bottom in which 
the eggs are placed. Sea-water from the sup- 
ply pipes is led through the rubber tubing to 
the small space cut off by the fixed partition, 
and, passing through a hole in the latter and 
a corresponding hole in the egg box, spreads 
over the eggs and passes out through the scrim 
bottom. The movable partition, which does 
not quite reach to the bottom of the compart- 
ment, cuts off a space at the other end, in 



212 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

which is located a standpipe extending not 
quite to the top of the compartment. This is 
covered by a cyhndrical cap of large diameter, 
the two together forming a siphon. The in- 
flowing water, after passing among the eggs, 
fills the compartment to the top of the stand- 
pipe, when it is rapidly siphoned off until the 
bottom of the cap is exposed and the siphon 
flow is broken. Thus, about every seven min- 
utes the compartments are filled and nearly 
half emptied, the surface of the water rising 
and falling like the tide, and suggesting the 
name, "tidal box," by which this apparatus 
is known. Cod is the principal fish hatched 
here, as this fish spawns along the coast of New 
England and on the offshore banks from Nov- 
ember to April. The eggs, of which nearly 
ten million may be produced by a seventy-five- 
pound fish, are about one eighteenth of an 
inch in diameter. The eggs for hatching are 
procured either by the *' Norwegian method" 
or by "stripping." About 426,000 of them are 
placed in each hatching-box, in a layer one and 
one half inches deep, and the tidal current of 



FALMOUTH THE PROSPEROUS 213 

water is maintained constantly until they 
hatch — an average period of fifteen days. 
After they hatch, the fry are carried by boats 
to various parts of Vineyard Sound and Buz- 
zard's Bay, and carefully emptied into the 
water, where they undergo their future devel- 
opment under natural conditions. 

In the year 1913-14, 82,000,000 cod, 373,- 
000,000 flounders, and 2,500,000 mackerel were 
hatched in this station and planted in the ad- 
jacent waters. Sea-bass, tautog, scup, and 
lobster have also been hatched. When we con- 
sider the high cost of living, and the fact that 
the annual value of the fishery products of 
Alaska is about twenty million dollars (or over 
two and a half times the original cost of the 
territory to the United States), we see the 
direct economic as well as scientific value of 
such a station as this. 

In addition to the hatchery, there is also a 
large laboratory, a small chemical laboratory, 
and a number of individual research rooms; all 
sorts of nets, seines, and collecting apparatus, 
and a very fine library, where about fifteen 



214 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

or twenty investigators are busy all summer 
long. 

Besides the Marine Biological Station at 
Wood's Hole, a great deal of gayety and out- 
door informal good time is brought to the town 
by the Marine Biological Association, where 
about a hundred and fifty men and girls, young 
doctors and all sorts of research workers, con- 
gregate for study during the summer months. 
While not organically connected with the sta- 
tion, the two institutions cooperate in many 
ways, and as a result, the marine life of the 
Wood's Hole region is more fully and accurately 
known than that of any other region of simi- 
lar extent on the western shore of the Atlantic. 
In fact, there are few regions anywhere in the 
world where such knowledge is more complete. 
Of marine animals alone approximately seven- 
teen hundred species are listed from Vineyard 
Sound and Buzzard's Bay, and the marine 
plants are correspondingly numerous. There 
is something that reminds one of a Greek fable 
in this community of studious and yet social 
men and women, spending the summer on the 



FALMOUTH THE PROSPEROUS 215 

shore of a classic coast, working diligently to 
solve the question of general habits and dis- 
tribution of fish; the regulation and conserva- 
tion of the fisheries; the investigation of fish- 
ery by-products; the extraction of oils and 
gelatins from the waste products; and the 
effect of various industrial water pollutions on 
economic marine animals. 

What more fitting place for such a study 
than here, where for hundreds of years the 
community made its living from the labor of 
those earlier devotees of ocean life — those 
bronzed sea captains and sturdy fishermen 
and all the goodly crew of Cape Cod mariners, 
who, like those other ancients, "went down 
to the sea in ships"? 



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Chapter XVI 
BY A CAPE COD POND 

IT lies, like a shallow glass bowl of clear 
water, a rim of snowy sand encircling it 
with the prettiest of borders. On three sides 
rise the gentle hills, folding themselves away 
in veils of haze. On the fourth side curves the 
country road, half hidden by the thick shrub- 
bery; only the shrubbery is cut open in two 
places near the road to make an entrance for 
the thirsty horse. In the autumn the copper 
and bronze foliage is reflected in its burnished 
surface; in the spring the seed pods drop off 
and drift across the unruffled translucence. 
The sun glints across it; the stars smile into 
it; and on quiet nights the moon unrolls a long 



BY A CAPE COD POND 217 

wide path of silver from end to end. Pond- 
lilies float in the sheltered cove, and here and 
there the sharp fin of a leaping fish cuts the 
thin surface. Sometimes a solitary bather 
pushes his way through the swamp honey- 
suckle, and wades out into the delicious cool- 
ness; more often fishermen, in an old-fashioned 
rowboat, rip, with its keel, a noiseless and 
quickly obliterated seam in the sleek silk ex- 
panse. During the day an occasional passer- 
by, jogging along in his country buggy, stops 
and drives his horse and wagon down to the 
edge, then urging the beast on into the water 
itself, gives him time to drink, and to gaze 
reflectively at the hills. Then, making a 
half -circle, with water up to the hubs, — he 
drives out again a few rods farther on. Deer 
come, too, and lesser woodland folk, shy and 
eager. 

Linger here a moment by this unnamed 
pond in the midst of the woods, and let the 
warm sand — as fine and white as that upon 
the ocean shore, although the ocean is miles 
from here — run through your fingers. You 



218 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

are in communion with one of the most char- 
acteristic and lovely of Cape Cod secrets. 

When Thoreau took his walk down one side 
of the Cape and up the other, he saw little of 
the inland country. He does not even mention 
the frequency and extraordinary beauty of 
these unexpected sheets of water. And yet 
there is no region in Massachusetts more 
brightly jeweled in this way than is Barnstable 
County. There are one hundred and seventy- 
four ponds — of over ten acres in area — in 
this small section : tw o of them are of one hun- 
dred acres, and three are of seven hundred 
acres. There are twenty-seven in the township 
of Barnstable alone, and no town has less than 
five. Nor does this enumeration include the 
hundreds of pondlets — tinier but by no 
means less bewitching — very like this one 
where we are now sitting. Such dimples of 
limpid water fleck the Cape everywhere, often 
surrounded by rolling meadow or pasture land, 
divided by a fence rail that runs twenty feet 
or so into the water, to keep separate the cows 
from different farms. Often a farmhouse with 



BY A CAPE COD POND 219 

its barns and sheds stands on a hilltop over- 
looking the water, making a picture idyllic in 
the extreme. You have not seen Cape Cod un- 
less you have taken time to walk to some such 
intimate spot and sit for a long half-hour and 
listen to the sounds of the forest life around 
you, and see the shadows of clouds and trees 
dissolve and form again in the flawless mirror. 
Botanists have studied this peculiarity of Cape 
Cod with minute and loving attention ; and the 
fruit of their research is full of flavor. 

The smaller ponds usually lie in an amphi- 
theater, and have neither outlet nor inlet. The 
bottom and shore are commonly of white sand, 
and the water crystal clear. They are spring- 
fed, and there is an overflow through the upper 
loose soil by percolation. Undoubtedly many 
of the fresh-water ponds which are near sea- 
level were originally inlets from the sea, cut 
off by the formation of sandbars at their 
mouths. Some are still near enough to get the 
tang of ocean spray splashed into them on a 
high wind. The annual rainfall has made them 
fresh. When we realize that the annual rain 



£20 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

supply amounts to forty inches a year for such 
sheets of water, and that an inch of rain upon 
an acre of water surface amounts to one hun- 
dred tons, it is easy to see how the annual sup- 
ply of four thousand tons would freshen any 
land-locked lake. But although they are fresh, 
they still retain enough common and other 
mineral salts to give them a peculiarly bril- 
liant sparkle and a pleasant taste — quite un- 
like the flatness of rain or distilled water. This 
quantity of salt is very minute — about one 
thousandth as much as in sea-water. If it 
becomes more — as, for instance, one tenth 
of one per cent — the water is brackish. It is 
interesting to trace the diminution of chlorine 
as one leaves the coast and journeys inland. 

Thus, Shank Painter Pond, in Provincetown, 
has almost three times as much chlorine as has 
Long Pond or Ashumet in Falmouth. The ac- 
companying table shows the consistency of 
this theory. 

The elevation of the ponds is also worthy 
of mention. The highest is Peter's in Sandwich. 
It has an elevation of ninety feet. Then come 



BY A CAPE COD POND 



221 



Name of pond 


Location 


Area 


Amount of 
chlorine 


Shank Painter 

Clapp's Pond 

Great Pond 


Provincetown 

Provincetown 

Eastham 

Brewster 

Barnstable 

Mashpee 

Mashpee 

Falmouth 

Falmouth 


83 

72 
lU 
700 
770 
240 

205 


2:42 
2:39 
1:98 


Long Pond 


1:44 


Nine-Mile Pond 

Mashpee Lake 

John's Pond 

Ashumet 

Long Pond. . 


1:05 

:85 
:81 

:77 
:87 







Mashpee, Spectacle, Triangle and Lawrence 
Ponds in Sandwich, with elevations of sixty 
to eighty feet. Cotuit, Ashubael, and Round 
Ponds in Barnstable and Mill Pond in Brew- 
ster have about thirty feet. Mill and Follin's 
Ponds, tributaries of Bass River in Yarmouth, 
Long and Swan Ponds in Yarmouth, Swan 
Pond in Dennis, Long Pond in Brewster, and 
Hinckley's Pond in Harwich have elevations 
of from ten to twenty feet. Few of the larger 
ponds of the easterly towns of the Cape have 
an elevation of more than fifteen feet above the 



sea. 



Another curious point which always seems 



222 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

quite incredible is this : similar as these ponds 
may be to the casual observer, both in size and 
conformation, every single one is distinctive 
in its algse and its microscopic flora. Even in 
ponds separated by a ridge of barely half a 
mile, — as in Ashumet and John's Ponds, — 
the naturalist will find totally different assort- 
ments of animal and vegetable life. Such is the 
individuality that Nature so jealously main- 
tains, even in her geographical and topo- 
graphical offspring. 

The largest, deepest, and most beautiful of 
all freshwater bodies on the Cape are those of 
Mashpee and Wakeby — two incomparable 
lakes, only partially separated from each other 
by Canaumet Neck, a piece of land owned by 
President Lowell, of Harvard, and undoubt- 
edly the most superb piece of woodland in the 
whole county. Here one finds beech trees with 
a spread of fifty feet, their smooth barks gleam- 
ing against the white of the sand and the blue 
of the water. Here one finds a solemn cathe- 
dral grove through which the sunlight filters 
as through majestic stained-glass windows. 



BY A CAPE COD POND 223 

Here are stretches of beach as white as snow- 
drift, pretty bluffs and glossy thickets. Here 
it was that Grover Cleveland and Joseph Jef- 
ferson used to love to come and fish, and many 
a humbler angler since then has enjoyed as 
keen a delight upon these tranquil waters. 
There are three little round islands in Mashpee 
Lake, wooded to the rim, and rising in a soft 
conical peak in the center, like decorative 
features in an imaginary landscape, quite as 
lovely as Ellen's Isle that Sir Walter Scott has 
made immortal. They are the goals for ad- 
venturous swimmers, picnic spots for fisher- 
men, and a final touch of enchantment for 
spectators from the shore. 

For many years these perfect lakes — mak- 
ing a region as entrancing as that of the Eng- 
lish Lake District — were almost unknown to 
any except the canny fishermen, who made no 
haste to share them with the world. But they 
have been discovered now, and the woodland 
about the border — bearing trees quite dif- 
ferent in their sheltered loftiness from the 
wind-twisted ones near the ocean — has been 



224 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

quietly bought up. One by one mansions are 
springing up near the shore, concealed behind 
a leafy screen, and the green bow of a canoe 
pulled up under the shade of a beech tree and 
the thread of smoke from some hidden camp 
betray that the summer visitor is here. 

Go where you will on Cape Cod, you will 
never be far from a wood-enshrouded or a pas- 
ture-framed pond or lake. Often you will find 
a shady beach in the heart of a forest patch; 
and often a tangle of sweet swamp growth 
fringing the moor that shelves down to an old 
mill pond. 

You may bathe or picnic here with impu- 
nity. You may fish if you choose, and you will 
find the people who live in the neighboring 
house and who own the rowboat generous with 
the loaning of it. Pickerel is preeminently the 
fish of the fresh water of the Cape, but you 
will find quick-mouthed bass, perch, and, in 
the streams, trout. But do not build a fire as 
you may have built it in other woods. The 
Cape has been ravaged too many times by 
flames, and the miles and miles of gaunt spec- 



BY A CAPE COD POND 225 

tral trees, blackened and tortured out of all 
shape, are mute warnings against the careless 
match or the flying spark and are explana- 
tions of the rigor of the forest regulations. 

It all lies before you for your pleasure — the 
fairy pools and shimmering lakes clasped in 
the tender embrace of greenery. They yield to 
the easy demands of the cranberry dike and 
submit with meekness to the ploughing of the 
fisherman's keel. But they are only shallow 
things at best. Even if they were near enough 
to be accessible to the cities of eastern Massa- 
chusetts, the great pumps of the Boston Water 
Works and of Chestnut Hill could empty them 
in a few days. Not one of them has a contrib- 
uting watershed or is fed by a stream of suf- 
ficient size to furnish the needs of a metro- 
politan population. But they will always be 
part of the welcome that Cape Cod extends to 
her children and to her children's friends — 
forever a delight to those who know them well 
and to those who chance upon them for the 
first time. 







Chapter XVII 
A FORGOTTEN CORNER OF CAPE COD^ 

A RAGGED pile of sticks by the side of 
the meandering road — long sticks and 
short sticks; green sticks and rotten sticks; 
every villager who passes flings a branch or 
a stone upon the ''Indian's Tavern." The 
dark-eyed children, shy and foreign-looking, 
cannot tell you why, even when they are rac- 
ing by at top speed, they are invariably and 
irresistibly impelled to pick up a twig, and, as 
they run, to toss it on the uncouth heap. And 
neither can their mothers tell you, or their 

^ This sketch of Masbpee was written by my mother, Rosa- 
mond Pentecost Rothery, and appeared in the Bourne In- 
dependent in 1903. 



A FORGOTTEN CORNER 227 

fathers, or their grandparents. And yet here, 
in this forgotten corner of Cape Cod, is thus 
automatically preserved the last fragment of 
an ancient Indian rite. This pile of rubbish at 
the crossroads is the lineal descendant of the 
Sacrificial Rock, about which the American 
Indians have cherished an immemorial tradi- 
tion — too vague to have been translated, but 
deeply enough rooted to have been for centu- 
ries unbrokenly maintained. 

This curious custom, this mystical "In- 
dian's Tavern," is only one of the strange 
sights that await you if you will penetrate into 
the quaint town of Mashpee. It is a queer, 
quiet little place, inland, — as much as any- 
thing can be inland on Cape Cod, — which, 
as early as 1650, was set aside as an Indian 
reservation. Now, though no longer a reserva- 
tion, and with its ten thousand acres slipping 
gradually into the possession of the white man, 
it still retains a surprising flavor of distinction. 

Although automobilists constantly whizz by 
on the excellent State road, few know enough 
to turn aside a little, and detect, straggling 



228 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

through the wood, the primitive hamlet, with 
its small gray houses, — placed with a fine dis- 
regard to the building line or the future, — its 
crystal lake, — loveliest on Cape Cod, — and 
its dark-skinned, handsome folk, with the in- 
scrutable poise which characterizes the In- 
dian, and the lustrous eyes which betray an 
African tincture. There are plenty of good 
Cape-Codders who have never been to Mash- 
pee, although it is only half a dozen miles from 
Sandwich, not much farther from Falmouth 
and Bourne, a gentle ride from Cotuit and 
Osterville, and near to Plymouth in both age 
and story. People from Buzzard's Bay pos- 
sibly do not dare to thread the bewildering 
roads which crisscross the scorched woods 
encircling the charmed section. But the fisher- 
men know it well, for here in the spring the 
jeweled trout flits through the twisting river 
and the flashing bass and polished pickerel leap 
to — and from — the hook of the lucky man 
who hires a fishing privilege. Grover Cleve- 
land knew Mashpee Lake joining Wakeby, 
around a peerless promontory, and so did 



A FORGOTTEN CORNER 229 

Joseph Jefferson, and a score of other eminent 
men, of whom pleasant memories still linger 
among the friendly natives. And the gunners 
from far and near know it, too, and their 
shacks are hidden around the white shore of 
the water that mirrors the passing moods of 
sky and cloud and beckons to the screaming 
wild duck in the clear fall weather. 

Even if you have heard nothing of the un- 
usual history of the place, you cannot help but 
be struck by the soft-voiced people, none of 
them rich and few of them poor, and the air 
of Sabbath calm that pervades all times and 
seasons. If you alight from your machine or 
carriage and go afoot, — as visitors to Mash- 
pee ought to go, — you will be tempted to 
linger in the little store, where one can ex- 
change eggs for cheese, potatoes for meal, and 
turnips for thread. And where, if one has not 
eggs or potatoes or turnips, one may get credit. 
You will glance at the cheerful graveyard bask- 
ing in the sun at the juncture of the cross- 
roads, and see, among the half -obliterated 
mounds, — all lying ranged from north to 



:S0 (WPE COD NEW AND OLD 

south, a grave ^vhicll luoasiiros ton foot long 
from hoadstono to footstono: a mute reminder 
that the ancient one ^vas a mighty man in his 
generation. There are no eight-footers above 
ground nowadays. If you have time you will 
let yourself be lured down some of the byx^aths. 
overgrown with trailing arbutus in the spring, 
and lK\uy with wild roses and laurel in the 
early summer: paths that lead to cabins where 
solitary Indians live, and others that lead to 
the low wooded hills, whence comet h their 
help — and their tirewood. Perhaps after you 
have strolled about the village for a while. 
or come back again, — once or twice or many 
times, — you may grow curious as to its ori- 
gin and unique history, as instinct with pathos 
and inspiration as that of many a more pre- 
tentions spot. And then, perhaps, you will 
tn' and tind out for yourself some of the facts 
I have here set down. 

It was in U\iO that the Commonwealth of 
Massiiclmsetts. uncomfortably conscious of its 
obligations to the native inhabitants of Mash- 
pee, who were being steadily crowded out of 



A FORGOTTEN CORNER 231 

their happy hunting grounds, set aside then 
several thousand acres of land for their use, 
on condition that "no Indian should sell or 
white man buy of an Indian, any land with- 
out a license first obtained from the General 
Court." At this time the Indians were also 
made wards of the State. While the material 
advantages of this arrangement were so great 
that Mashpee became a popular asylum for 
red men from all over New England, — for 
the hills were wooded and full of game, the 
many ponds, lakes, and rivers yielded an 
abundance of fish, and the natural formation 
of the land made it, as the eld record explains, 
"a most favorable place for gaining a liveli- 
hood without labor," — yet there was a fly in 
the ointment. 

The sense of guardianship galled a people 
unconquerably independent. Defiance of it, 
acquiescence to it, complaints, revolts, fol- 
lowed each other in perpetual sequence. The 
Mashpee tribe gained the management of its 
own affairs in 1693; held it for three years; lost 
it; were incorporated into a district in 1763, 



232 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

and the act was repealed in 1788. When, in 
1870, the plantation was finally incorporated 
into a town, there was not a single pure-blooded 
Indian left to enjoy the privilege. Of course, 
all these upheavals were accompanied by bit- 
ter controversy. The records reveal quite un- 
mistakably how this little settlement of In- 
dians, with their imperviousness to the white 
man's point of view, was a thorn in the side of 
the Pilgrim Fathers. Just how the Indians 
regarded the pale-faced intruders who wrested 
the whole tract of countryside away from them 
and doled out some thousand acres, need only 
be surmised. Mashpee represented an Indian 
problem in miniature, and Indian problems are 
too well and too sadly known to need further 
exposition. How^ever, the little settlement did, 
at last, attain its existence as a town, and in due 
time sent its representative to the Legislature. 
But the many marks, some of them naively 
touching, of the plantation era, still remain. 
You may notice, for instance, how frequently 
persons in Mashpee still own precisely sixty 
acres of land — exactly the number that was 



A FORGOTTEN CORNER 233 

originally apportioned off to each male adult. 
Many more now, alas, now that they are at 
liberty to sell and buy, are dispossessed of 
their ancestral heritage. 

But if the civil history of Mashpee has been 
somewhat marred by discontent, the ecclesias- 
tical history is both cheerful and uncommon. 
From 1630, when good Mr. Jonathan Bourne 
turned his attention toward evangelizing the 
Indians, there has been an unbroken line of 
preachers, whose salary is provided for in true 
story-book fashion. It happened in this way. 
In 1790 Dr. Samuel Williams, an EngHsh gen- 
tleman of piety and learning, died, leaving 
his estates in England to Harvard College, 
on "condition that sixty pounds per annum be 
allowed to two persons, well qualified as to 
prudence and piety, to be nominated by trus- 
tees of the estate, to preach as itinerants, in 
the English plantations, for the good of what 
pagans and blacks may be neglected there." 
The will goes on at some length to state that 
"if the College at Cambridge be hindered in 
its encouragement of this blessed work of con- 



234 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

verting the poor Indians, then the estates, to- 
gether with all the accruing profits and ad- 
vantages, shall go to the City of Boston." 

The "College in Cambridge" seems not to 
have been "hindered in its encouragement" 
or despoiled of its trust. And to this day it 
continues to send to Mashpee, four times a 
year, that part of the money due it, which sum 
is directly applied to the minister's salary. 
There appears never to have been any ques- 
tion but that the fund left for the conversion 
of the neglected pagans of New England be- 
longs to this parish! Thus it was that in 1790 
Mashpee had the only organized Indian church 
in the Commonwealth, and has, for over a 
hundred years, boasted an endowed church. 
However, it was the custom of their white 
guardians to appoint the missionary for the 
church without consulting the wishes of the 
members. Sometimes he was to their liking 
and the edification of their souls, and then all 
went well. Sometimes he was not; and the 
church made history fast and furious. It was 
the determination of the Mashpee tribe to 



A FORGOTTEN CORNER 235 

be masters of their own spiritual affairs that 
finally resulted in their freedom from all State 
control. 

Although it is impossible to catch the at- 
mosphere of a bygone age from dry data, 
nevertheless, the mere names of some of the 
preachers who fervently exhorted "the neg- 
lected pagans" of this settlement, reconstruct 
for us a glimpse of a picturesque procession. 
First there was Mr. Bourne, who, assisted by 
the famous John Eliot, organized the church. 
Then came Simon Popmonet, an Indian, who 
died after a ministry of forty years, leaving, 
as the old record puts it, '' several children, who 
all lived to a great age, and some of them are 
very respectable for Indians." Then came the 
Reverend Joseph Bourne, grandson of the 
first. And then Solomon Briant, an Indian, 
preaching always in the Indian tongue. Do 
not these names, with the brief note we have 
of them, impart, even to this day, an aroma of 
the past? 

Unusual as Mashpee has been in its civil 
and ecclesiastical development, it boasts still 



236 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

another difference. The racial mixture here 
has produced striking results. First of all, of 
course, there were the Indians, living in wig- 
wams made of sedge, hunting, fishing, and 
weaving their own clothes. They have left a 
special stamp upon the lineaments and car- 
riage of their descendants: a brave erectness; 
a dignity and a reserve. Although the last 
member of the community who could speak 
the Indian tongue died twenty-five years ago, 
and the last pure-blooded one in 1793, yet one 
can easily recognize in the deeply furrowed 
faces, the aquiline noses, and the straight 
black hair, remnants of that poignant strain. 
In 1771 there were fourteen negroes in the 
town of Mashpee and forty or fifty Indians. 
Twenty-one years later there was not a sin- 
gle pure-blooded Indian left. It was this 
infusion that brought the musical mellow 
voices, — it is a revelation to hear a Mash- 
pee congregation sing, — the laughter and 
the dancing feet. However, the alloying of 
the Indian type is not wholly due to negro 
aflaliations. Some of the Hessians who were 



A FORGOTTEN CORNER 237 

captured in the Revolution were sent to 
Mashpee to oversee the salt-works. These 
intermarried, leaving as their most permanent 
contribution a few names such as Hirsch, De 
Grasse, etc. Of later years the Portuguese have 
drifted in, turning the sandy fields into quite 
miraculous strawberry farms, and bringing, 
too, certain quaint and vivid touches of color 
and custom from their home at Cape Verde. 
But in spite of its heterogeneous ancestry, the 
Mashpee folk still prefer to call themselves 
Indians. The names of Attiquin, Amos, 
Coombs, Pocknet, and half a dozen others 
which frequently recur on the old records, are 
still jealously preserved and handed down with 
pride. And tradition, like that of "Indian's 
Tavern," is kept green by faithful observance. 
But even if one should tell the complete his- 
tory of Mashpee, only one half would then be 
told. For the other half is intangible, made up 
of balmy air, brooding sky, and blessed sense 
of peace. And why should there not be peace, 
when every man is as one with nothing to make 
him afraid? The summer is long and the win- 



238 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD 

ter is kind. The minister's salary is off their 
minds, and the soil is perfect for the scratch- 
ing hen. The hills hide many rich cranberry 
bogs, where men, women, and children may 
earn full wages in the fine fall weather, if they 
are so inclined. 

No one hurries: indeed, how could one? 
There is no bustling square; no crowded mar- 
ket-place; no rival church with clanging bells 
to split the wide tranquillity; no flying to 
catch the train, for there is no train, soiling 
the blue with a smoky pennant. It was only a 
season or two ago that we saw a barefooted 
girl, with blowing hair and smiling face, drive 
an ancient horse, attached to a still more 
ancient wagon, into a wide stream, and then 
proceed to dip a bucket, fastened to a pole, 
into the water, and draw it up and turn it into 
a barrel on the wagon. This she did gayly and 
gracefully, and no doubt frequently, for they 
had no well, and always procured their water 
this way — summer and winter. Yet there 
were men in the family, and plenty of water 
to be had for the digging. 



A FORGOTTEN CORNER 239 

If any one chooses to go to Mashpee and see 
if these things are true, he is charged to throw 
away ambition, and be still, and learn what 
Sunday calm means all the days of the week. 

But let him go soon, for horrid rumors are 
abroad. Already electric lights have sparkled 
forth to shame the fireflies, and the white man 
has been seen there with clanking chains and 
strange, uncanny instruments, that affright 
the brown babies and the careless birds. 
Wooded stakes have sprung up along the guilt- 
less forest roads, and lo ! who knows when their 
mantle of peace may be torn to shreds, and 
their rest joined to our restlessness by black 
iron rails, and the twisted cable of progress 
and electricity.^ 

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